My mother was raised on a farm eight miles northeast of my home town. Until I was eight or nine years old (when they built a house in town, and we moved back), we visited Grandma and Grandpa on the farm fairly often, and in the summer we stayed for long periods.

I remember this house and yard in homey detail... sleeping on the second floor in one of two large bedrooms, which had two double beds in it... Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom off the kitchen... Noxzema and Grandma’s plastic pearl necklace...how cold the house was on winter mornings before Grandpa got the fire going, and how cosy I was in bed, listening to the early-morning activity downstairs.

I remember the old wooden railing along the stairs, and sweltering summer days spent in a double mattress suspended hammock-style on heavy chains between two spruce trees just south of the house. Somewhere there is a photograph of my sister and I wearing grey plastic old-lady 'wigs'.

Once we ran naked outside in the rain while the adults watched us. I remember the wooden seats of the swings made by coarse ropes hung between the posts at each end of the clothesline, seen in the painting below, which illustrates the house itself so much better than the aerial view of the photo above.

Next to the kitchen sink was a handpump for water; warm water was in a reservoir in the cookstove. As I sat out on the step in front of the porch on hot afternoons, flies buzzed busily, and the sense of contentment I had then still comes back to me when I hear flies buzzing in the heat of the day.

My American uncle painted this picture of Grandma and Grandpa B’s homestead, and it now hangs over Grandpa’s lazyboy chair in the living room at their house in town. Of course, Grandpa has been gone for about five years and now it’s my tiny little grandma who sits there to watch TV every evening. She loves hockey, curling, and football.

In his later years Grandpa used to fall asleep in his chair. When he was awake, he’d say to any one of his granddaughters, myself included, “Cut my toenails” and we’d dutifully go get the clippers and do it for him. Or he’d say “Dish up some ice cream” and we’d fill cereal bowls with it and take his to him and he’d complain “What's this? I need more than that,” and back to the kitchen we’d go.

I miss him -- his "Yep, Yep," his little jiggy dance in the kitchen every once in a while, his chair near the counter where the toaster would sit at breakfast time, and he'd pop the toast down and then transfer it hot to the table to be buttered. He liked cream, and would pour it over white bread in a bowl, then sprinkle white sugar on it and eat it with a spoon.

xoxo
Kate