A hard life can be a good life. Many of us today have lost touch with that fact. The Mennonites who came to Manitoba, Canada at the turn of the century came for better lives. They didn’t expect easy ones. Three generations on, in 1921, one austere, deeply religious, family welcomed baby Linda to the branch living in Alberta; welcomed her to a unique hard good life.
Many years later that baby, Linda Penner, wrote a memoir to document her life in Alberta. And many years after that, Linda’s grandson, Ivan Penner responded to a story I posted about the memoir of an incredibly tough Canadian, Olive A. Frederickson. Ivan told me about his grandmother and about her memoir. Turns out Northern Canada had more than one incredibly tough lady.
From her childhood Linda remembered chores. Mom dispatched the smallest children in her very large brood to match wits with the farm’s chickens. A hen’s goal is to keep her eggs so she can sit on them and produce chicks. The child’s goal is to find the eggs and take them to the kitchen where mom turns them into food.
The chickens have a problem. Proud of the eggs they produce, they strut and cackle, leading the child right to the nest. And small children inherit this job in the first place because they can wriggle into tight spots to retrieve the prizes.
In June, harvesting brome grass hay, required the talents of bigger kids—and adults. Two horses dragged a mower through the field laying the grass down. People wielded hand rakes to pull it into rows. When it dried, the horses dragged a “hayrack” down the rows while people pitched the hay aboard, arranging it and piling it as high and tight as possible. Back in the yard they pitched the hay to the ground and piled it in stacks, arranged just so to shed water.
Hay fed the animals. Potatoes fed the people.
Dad dug the potatoes out of the ground, everybody else crawled behind him on hands and knees picking them out of the dirt, putting them in buckets and dumping the buckets in the wagon. “By evening our knees were bloated and sore and our fingernails so packed with dirt that they were pulling away from the skin and we were tired and hungry… At home we shoveled them into a chute leading into our dirt cellar.”
Linda wrote a fascinating memoir and we aren’t done with it.
Stay tuned.
I blew it. Ivan is Linda’s son. Not her grandson.
Oh! Give me more!!
Well I will. Thank you.