SPRINGING INTO SPRING

   I know spring will happen because it has done so each year in my living memory for nearly ninety years.  This chapter starts when I am nearly four years old and have gathered a bouquet of golden wildflowers that we called buffalo beans.  I am rushing back inside to present them to my mother. She smiles her thanks as her small feet pause for a few seconds only since she is so busy pumping the treadle of her Singer Sewing machine.  Every moment was needed for this young mother since she was holding a secret within her heart.   I did not know it at the time but child number six was on the way and would be arriving close to Christmas Day.  She tells me to put the flowers in a jar of water. To bleach out the printing on the flour-sacks she first boiled them for an hour.  This was the fabric she used to sew the underwear for their five children.  Our father is shouldering his spade to check out the dikes that need to be secured with wooden gates to control the spring floods that rush down from the Cyprus Hills.  The Ketchum Creek branches off from the Manyberries Creek and will be ready in case spring arrives early and could flood our yard.

  After the waters had risen to the top of each dike our father would open the wooden gates to let the water flow into the next field until the entire half section was well soaked with the snow-melt from the Cyprus Hills. Our gently sloping half section of land becomes well irrigated as the rushing waters flow on into Pakowki Lake.  The much deeper and wider Manyberries Creek embraces the land north of ours and also flows into Pakowki Lake.  In this manner the grain fields are well soaked and help sustain the crops through the hot windy summers of southern Alberta.  Moody thunderstorms might switch to hailstorms and flatten all those hard-won grain crops and gardens.    

   Three sons and one daughter walked a mile to attend our small country school, I had to wait until age six to register for Grade one.  Officials had declared “Until children are six years old their small brains are not developed enough to begin studying reading, writing and arithmetic.”  During the coming winter months I coaxed my father to teach me the alphabet and to read and write while mother’s multiplicity of duties kept her busy caring for the garden, and with her 22 rifle shooting the wild prairie chickens that had fed on our summer’s growing crops of grain to fatten themselves up for their long flight south. The large flour sacks were cut into squares that would soon be required.    

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