My dad’s first job as a highschool teacher was in a small town not far from home. I was five years old when they rented a tiny little house, with an upstairs, on Main Street.

Memories:

— Seeing Dad come through the livingroom with a box held over his head, and on that box, pictures of Barbie. He was attempting to sneak my Christmas present past me! I must have put up quite a fuss, because it seems to me I got not only Barbie a month before Christmas, but her sidekick, freckled brunette Midge, as well.

— Convincing the nextdoor neighbour’s grandson to accompany me into the outhouse in the park that bordered our back yard, promising I’d show him mine if he’d show me his. When he did, I laughed and pointed and ran away. He never did get to see mine.

— My younger sister and I spent a lot of time with the United Church minister’s kids, across the street.

We were kept busy doing crafts at their kitchen table, or digging snow tunnels in the deep drifts in their side yard. Once when Jill and I were chasing each other around a rectangular coffee table in their livingroom, she fell and cracked her head on the corner of it and needed to go for stitches. When my parents came back to get me, I was hiding under a bed as if afraid I’d been responsible.

— Dad had a black leather strap that was about 18 inches long, tapered at one end. When we moved into a larger house the second year in that town,

across the street from the high school, I buried that strap in the back yard of the house we left behind. I was six years old.

If my mother ever struck me, her blows were ineffectual. Her way of disciplining and punishing was to threaten to tell Dad what we’d done. He’d apply the strap or, after it mysteriously went missing, he’d take off his belt. Perhaps it wasn’t often or even overly severe, but we were terrified of that belt.

— When I walked to school in Grade One, I carried a flat, square tin lunchkit with cowboys on the sides. One day it disappeared between school and home, and was never found. To this day I don’t understand that. It was only a few blocks, after all.

— In the winter, the elementary schoolchildren would pile hard blocks of snow into a high, angled pile. Water would be poured over it to create an icy surface, and it would be used to toboggan on in the schoolyard. I have never seen this done again.

We lived in that little town for only two years, but it remains a warm memory. Mom and Dad have retained many of Dad’s colleagues from those years as friends, and as a teenager I often spent summer weeks there with a galpal. As an adult, I imagined it the perfect small town to live in.

To this day, I sometimes dream of the minister’s house. I dream that it is mine, with a perfect windowed veranda along its front.

We drive past this little town on our way to the city. It has a new landmark, as this entire area is a popular fall destination for bird hunters from the States, as well as for killers of white-tail deer.