Something I wrote about 12 years ago
The world has changed so dramatically that even someone who has not reached retirement has seen remarkable changes. I record these memoirs not with the thought that my insights are particularly profound, but with the view that my recollections, taken with other memoirs of the time, may give you a window into a world that is largely gone.
When I was born my parents owned a twenty acre farm near Yarrow, BC. Or should I say my father owned it. In those days a woman had very little claim on common property. This did not change until decades later. My father recalled later that it hadn’t occurred to him that he should not own a farm. He did not limit himself to farming. He typically worked for wages as well as farming.
They remembered there were apple trees on the farm and they often ate fried apples and sardines, as they were poor. They hauled their water from a well. They told me how you keep the water from sloshing out of the barrel. You float a piece of wood on top. If it is shaped the same as the opening, all the better.
My first memory of a home is of our 10 acre farm on McConnell Rd. near Chilliwack. The next farm on one side was owned by the McConnell family. So we weren’t that far removed from the original settlement of that area. In elementary school a teacher told us that 50 years earlier there had been more Indians than whites in BC. He may have said natives, but he wouldn’t have said aboriginal people or First Nations. I did not attend school with aboriginal people until I reached junior high. A man I later knew in political life grew up within five or ten miles of us on an island in the Fraser River, but our paths did not cross and I was ignorant of the aboriginal experience.
A back portion of the farm was bush. Just the kind of place a kid would like to explore. I remember the fallen trees and the interesting fungus on them. I don’t think it was original growth, but for some reason it was no longer cultivated. I wonder if trees had been allowed to grow there to provide firewood.
I don’t remember us using firewood. I do remember that we burned sawdust to heat the house and in our kitchen stove. The sawdust burned poorly and more than once my mother had to call my father to report a chimney fire. I expect sawdust was fairly cheap as there were many sawmills around.
My father would say that he was going to call “the Hindu” to buy sawdust. In fact the people who sold sawdust were Sikhs, but apparently that distinction was not widely known.
The nearest Sikh temple was in Abbotsford, a white wooden building I often saw from the highway.