Naming the West : Stories Turner Valley

Students' StoriesStudents' Stories

Seniors' StoriesSenior' Stories

Turner Valley Senior Story 1:
Turner Valley

We picked tonnes of berries, it seemed like. My mother canned everything. Raspberries, and gooseberries, and strawberries, and saskatoons and chokecherries if there was any. We picked lots of that stuff all my life. And people used to come to visit, and sometimes they would stay overnight, and sometimes if there were too many kids we had to sleep crossways in the bed instead of up and down. And for paper we used was the wrappers off the apples and the oranges. And if that ran out you used catalogue.

 

What did you use to wash your clothes?

 

My mother had a washing machine that had a handle on it, and you pulled it like this, and that made the barrel part of it, you pulled back and fourth on it. And then there was a ringer hooked to a rinse tub and that s where you would hand ring the clothes through that. We didn t have any electricity, no fuel, we burnt wood. And of course we had the, my dad and grandpa would go and cut the trees and leave them until they were dry, then bring them in. And we had to saw them, I remember when I was about eight or nine years old standing out at the far end of the tree trying to hold it up high enough so it didn t bend where the buzz saw was trying to cut the wood.

 

Our farm up there, hardly has any trees left of it. But there used to be all kinds of trees on it. We used to run down through the   we played everywhere. Up on that big hill, on the top of that hill, there was a rock ridge. We put rocks and stuff all out into big rooms and pretended we were playing house and stuff. We walked up that hill all the time, didn t think anything of it. We didn t have any toys to speak of, what we had we made. We had a bank along the north side of that shack, and we used to build- string from momma, if she d let us have it, and then we took twigs and we would make fences and houses and make it into a playground area of a, just a farm, a little model thing. We d do that, and we d played, I don t know if you ever heard of any of these games. We played tag, which I know you know about, and we played fox and goose in the winter time and Auntie-Eye-Over, and red light green light, and lots of things. And there were lots of trees around, so we would play in and out of the trees. And we didn t have a lot of toys, we would make our own fun.

3:05 video (5.93 Mb)

Valid CSS! Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional Canadian Culture Online