Homestead Part One

Growing up in a small farming community in South-Eastern Saskatchewan, You learned to do without certain things. Our house was on the outside of town, a two story almost perfectly cubed 4 bedroom structure that could be seen across the creek from most spots in town, because of the elevation and white color. Bellegarde is a town of about 35 people, but its population lies far beyond the meager “town limits”. There was little available to us immediately, but in this Hamlet we once had a Co-op hardware store, a Grocery store, and to the best of my knowledge, the town still has a Credit Union, a meeting hall (which used to double as the school gymnasium), Church, School, Post Office and Hockey Arena. The next town was Redvers or Antler, and depending on what you needed, both offered different services. Most of what we ate was from the enormous garden my Mother kept, with massive amounts of potatoes, corn, carrots and other items that could be stored, or pickled.

Bellegarde was (and still is) the center for a large number of farm families, it’s the place you traveled to on Sunday for church occasionally followed by a school fundraiser breakfast and/or volleyball tournament, and in winter it was where the general population of able bodied skaters gathered for a game of “shinny”, which would last for hours and would see the teams morph as the fresh legs arrived. The net on the waiting room side was pushed up as far as the home team blue line to ensure a sanctuary for the beginners and non-hockey enthusiast kids (which were rare) to skate.

The windows of the waiting room were most often lined with the images of parents, uncles, aunts and cousins peering through the windows at the action on the ice. There were also those who chose to play tag rather than subject themselves to the cold un-insulated natural ice rink that we have always had.

Monday to Friday was school time for my older brothers and I spent most of my days outdoors playing, building, or much to Dad’s dismay, taking things apart, and discovering new and exciting uses for his tools. He would be quick to point out that I lost more than I used and he would be right, but sometimes I never had the nerve to tell him what fate had befallen his new socket wrench set.

Our farmyard was structurally populated by two garages on the West side of the large gravel driveway which led north past the house and our front yard about ¼ of a mile past the massive garden, to the main road to town, which we referred to as the “correction line”. A little deeper to the West side of the drive was a chicken coop, and a small fenced off portion of yard for the newly hatched chicks to roam until they were big enough to graduate to the Chicken pens located at the South end of the property on the other side of our humble pasture nestled near the pig shed, and a few grain storage bins, which were small sheds converted to serve the purpose of protecting grain and feed from the elements.

On the East side of the drive was the main shed. It was most likely a machinery storage shed in a former life, but being that we weren’t grain farming, our family had no such machinery, so it was mostly used for my entertainment... as far as I can remember anyway.

The farm was one of my favorite memories of childhood, but with the good comes the bizarre, the bad and the funny. Next installment I'll tell you about my favorite spot on the farm.