Rose's Cantina

One of my fondest childhood memories is sitting outside my Granny's farmhouse and squishing a bag of orange and white liquid together to make "margarine". It didn't occur to me at the time that I was making an edible oil product for the family to use to slather on sandwiches and toast. To me, it felt like some miraculous operation to make something out of nothing. I also loved sitting with my Grandpa Loyal and cleaning smelly old smelt that we had caught in the local crick. Or shelling peas on a sweltering July afternoon, and sucking up the tiny jewels with my extended tongue and feeling the burst as they popped in my mouth. I loved my grandparents, and my Uncle Vern, with whom we lived until they left this Earth over a six year period, exactly two years apart. Vern was a 50ish man-child whose dad had died in the Great War and was adopted by my grandfather, a widower who lost his first wife and one twin in childbirth. In the 20s and 30s, that was how blended ...

I was raised on a farm, so you might expect that I was a rumbly tumbly little girl who spent her summer holidays working for my Grandpa Loyal and helping with the chores. Indeed, most of my classmates at Woodland Public School spent their summers picking fuzzy peaches, all Vaselined-up in their long sleeves, or planting rows of tomatoes and melons.  Even my brothers made their summer income working for Neighbour Art who ran a vast Gladiola farm next door. I was more of an indoor girl.  I preferred to sit inside on the couch playing board games with Art's son Squeaky or watching Monty Hall and Bob Barker titillate housewives with the dream of new appliances. My favorite shows were talk shows, and they were on for hours, so I watched them for hours. Then I went out and walk around, smelled the Glads and picked some fruit off the tree for a snack. Occasionally, I would help my Grandma Ina juice tomatoes or squish that orange stuff into the margarine. That's...

Vern and his siblings When I was a little girl, not bigger than a bug, I had a playmate, a devoted playmate, who followed me around, hitched the Golden Retriever to my wagon, and sang songs with me on the front porch. He liked to dress up like Freddie the Freeloader, and take me door-to-door on Hallowe'en. My childhood friend was my Uncle Vern, and he was 50-year-old. Vern was the first born of my Grandmother Ina, the son of her first husband Herbert who had died in the Great War. Unlike the other grownups, Vern wasn't much bigger than me. I'd say, he was five foot with his shoes on, You might say he was as tall as he was round, and had a cherubic face that was always plugged with a roll-yer-own; it was a face that always lit up when I walked in the room. When he wasn't playing with me, Vern helped on the farm weeding the rows of strawberries, picking cherries and plums, or feeding a virtual Canary Row of odd animals: a banty rooster, a crow my G...

Squeaky was my best friend growing up on the farm. Unlike the other boys who spent their days playing softball and lacrosse on our huge back lawn, Squeaky was an indoor boy who preferred to play cards or Monopoly or watch the Rifleman. Today, he would have been a video game nerd. Occasionally, Squeaky and I would venture out of the canvas tent we constructed in the backyard to go hunting for tadpoles over at Cole's Farm which had a dangerous little pond with all kinds of warning signs, "Keep Out" and "Danger" but it wasn't very well secured. So it was a complete magnet for kids like us equipped with mason jars for the trapping of all kinds of vermin. Our quest was to catch the taddies then watch them grow to be regular frogs which would, no doubt, fall victim to the older boys who liked to blow their heads off with firecrackers. Squeaky and I weren't exactly Steve Irwin. We always trapped too many and by the time we got home, they were nothing b...

 Photo by Beth Grant, Creative Commons    Over the years, I was subjected to some pretty inappropriate attempts at child-rearing. It was all part of that misguided notion among parents in the 1960s that kids should be taught to do adult things while they still lived at home. Like drinking, smoking, gambling -- those sorts of things. For example, I started drinking coffee at the age of five. By the time I got to public school, I had developed a three cup a day Instant coffee habit. I always tried to fill the coffee cup over the brim like the Maxwell House coffee commercial. It would never work, of course, because the people who make those commercials lie. Coffee spills into the saucer instead not matter how often you try this particular experiment. Didn't matter to me. I preferred to slurp my coffee from the saucer anyway. Hey, I was a kid. As on most farms, coffee was served at all hours and I drank my last cup before...

Photo by Shawn Ford http://www.flickr.com/photos/15066227@N00/   If anal retentiveness could be taught, the classroom would be in the outhouse, the bane of the existence of any kid who grew up poor on a farm.   I am still traumatized by the 14 years or so I spent making the chilly trek to the stinky little lean-to we called our bathroom. I'm sure even Ma and Pa Kettle had a commode, but not us. We had running water -- bathtubs and sinks full -- but it wasn't until Granny broke her hip, and I was in high school, that Gramps finally agreed to build a proper bathroom in the old farmhouse.    The outhouse brought early shame into my sensitive little bottom. No one -- not even my Auntie Alwyn or the Houtbys who lived down the road -- lived in a house where you had to put a coat on to do nature's little business. The lack of toilet facilities became my reason for visiting neighbors and gratefully going to school. (Although I must admit tha...

I recently went looking for pictures of me as a kid and I found only a few of them. That's because my wartime Dad died when I was eight months old and a) my mother had no one to whom she could send pictures b) she probably couldn't afford the film and c) she sucked as a photographer. Why did everyone back then take "point and shoot" literally? I mean, couldn't she have just come up a little closer? I suppose she was artfully looking for a nice wide shot that showed the bleakness of the tapestry that was our lives. Or she wanted to get the house in the picture. There were great pictures of my bros, cute ones, and tons of pictures of my mom and relatives. Not me. I was sort of like the little girl with no face. This picture is of me and my neighbor Ron Houtby, or Renald the Pig as he was monikered. The Houtby boys all had nicknames like that, except for Ron's older brother Tom who was a bad dude. He would have leveled a can of whoopass on the neighbo...

I've been mulling a change for some time. My old blog, Rose's Cantina, was turning me into a bitter old crone. I reminded myself of Granny Ina who used to hit the cat with her cane. The cat deserved a whooping, of course, because she was a miserable and mangy little cuss who lay in wait for Granny. When Granny came around the corner, Pixie would pounce on her leg, bite her ankles and sink her razor sharp teeth into the wrinkly old flesh. It was awesome. I realized recently if I didn't stop snarking at politicians and movie stars, I was going to morph into an eighty-pound dame who could wield a cane like a ninja operating nunchuks. So I've decided to change lanes and embark on a more positive, if not bizarre journey, which might land me a gig on CBC radio if I play my cards right. Think a mixture of Stuart Mclean and Jann Arden. Starden.  That's me. A little girl outstanding in her field. Just a country girl with a twang in my heart and a pack of do...

    Vern, Ivan, Lloyd and Vera: My mother's family  When I was a little farm kid, I had a playmate who stood about five foot tall and ran me around the yard in my little red wagon which he had hooked up to our Golden Retriever Penny. His name Vern and he was my best friend, a guy my mother could always count on to watch me, pick me up when I fell and scraped a knee, or put a cold compress on my leg when I got stung by one of Gramp's bees, which was pretty often. Vern loved to sit on the step of the house. He'd play an horrific version of one country song or another on his guitar or his fiddle. Sometimes, he accompanied himself on the harmonica or the Jew's harp. Twang-a-lang, Twang-a-lang . If I close my eyes, I can still hear him catterwalling. Vern liked to wail or yodel which is why Granny always made him sit outside. He was a terrible picker and a worse singer, but oh, my, how he loved his music. Vern wasn't one of the neighbor ki...