We Had Everything That Mattered James Osborne   © Copyright 2025 by James Osborne

Photo by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/Photo courtesy of the author.Photo by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/

The home on our farm was of similar vintage. The wood-fired kitchen stove provided the main source of heat for the two-story clapboard structure insulated with woodchips. A rusty handpump in the back yard supplied drinking water. Other utilities that we take for granted today were non-existent.

Backstory:

When I was between ages six to twelve our family farmed a remote one-hundred-and-sixty acres of wilderness land about ninety-five kilometers (sixty miles) west of Edmonton in western Canada. Dad had just been discharged from the Canadian Army following the Second World War. He had been the regimental sergeant-major for the Curry Barracks military base in Calgary, reporting to the base commander. A stressful job. Farming was an ideal stress antidote. From a young age Dad had wanted to farm. He drove his ‘Indian’ brand motorcycle a few times to visit a friend near a tiny village called Tomahawk, west of Edmonton. He’d met the farmer, Les Harrison, while both were working at Union Packing in Calgary. Les was working at the meat packing plant to support the farm he shared with his wife, Nellie, a warm and caring woman who my sisters and I came to affectionately call ‘Aunt Nellie’ although not related.

Photo by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/My father, John, at 20, on his Indian brand motorcycle. hoto by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/

A Fabulous Place Our wilderness farm was primitive, even by usual standards then in the spring of 1946. Our home, a former country store, didn’t have a phone for years. Unthinkable today, but we didn’t miss it. Nor did we know the convenience of electricity, or hot and cold running water. Television and the internet hadn’t even been imagined by most, much less invented. If we wanted to wash with warm water, we heated it in a pot on the stove, and if the stove was cold, we built a wood fire in it. Sometimes the necessary kindling needed to start the fire wasn’t handy in the indoor woodbox, so we went outside and cut some at the woodpile. We didn’t view this as better or worse than any other alternatives. There weren’t any.

Photo by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/Our home (foreground), a former general store, and the garage (background) 1946.oto by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/

The road to our farm. My father using his tractor to pull our car (front) and a neighbor’s car through a deep mudhole.

For the first few years, the only access to our farm was the dirt road that wandered through the trees. Spring thaw and summer rains often made the road impassible by car or truck. Dad frequently used our iron-wheeled tractor with big lugs to pull out our car and the cars of neighbours and visitors that got stuck in the thick clay mud; we called it gumbo. It may come as a surprise to some that regardless of what the farm lacked in amenities it was a fabulous place to grow up. Like most other farm families in the area, we were financially poor although as kids we were unaware of it and that knowledge wouldn’t have mattered had we known. Everything we needed was there – food, clothing, shelter, good health, and the unconditional love of our parents. We were happy. Farming is essentially an outdoor pursuit, so the confinement of long winter evenings were a challenge for us kids. Most  Photo by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/oto by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/

One winter I leafed through a thick Webster dictionary and then browsed our two-thousand-page Encyclopedia Britannica, both predecessors of Google. Other reading choices were limited: a choice between a few romance novels someone had given Mom, or a two-volume health reference manual with coloured illustrations of the human body she considered me and my sisters far too young to be exposed to.

The centerpiece of our kitchen was an enormous cast-iron cook stove. It rarely cooled during the day in summer and never in winter. That chrome-trimmed black monster had an insatiable appetite for firewood and coal, especially in winter when it was the primary heat source for our aging clapboard home. One of my chores was to help Dad split and carry in the wood to feed that unforgiving beast. He did most of the work, of course.

One day, the creaky cast iron pump in the back yard that supplied our water stopped working. Dad climbed to the bottom of the forty-foot well to find out why.

The rickety ladder nailed to the inside of the rotting wood casing was cause for much handwringing by Mom, until Dad re-emerged with the solution in hand: a mouse had had the audacity to fall into the well and allow its drowned body to clog the valve.

The Outhouse

A core component of our “bathroom facilities” was the outhouse. The tall structure of gray weathered wood stood guard at the end of a dirt path that curved around to the far side of the garage, discretely out of sight of our back door. Inside was a bench with a hole in it. That’s where we sat, year round. Unheated. Located conveniently on one side of the bench was last year’s department store catalogue that served as toilet paper. The softer newsprint pulp pages always disappeared first. The glossy full-color pages left behind eventually were replaced by the next discarded catalogue. We did graduate to the white, rolled stuff occasionally. Another important part of our “bathroom facilities” was a huge, galvanized tub that everyone used on Saturday night, starting with the youngest. Poor Dad was last. The water was hauled in from the pump by hand in buckets and poured into the tub located on the kitchen floor. Some water was heated on the cook stove ... not nearly enough or warm enough!

Photo by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/This is similar to the outhouse we used on our farm. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.oto by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/

Our imaginations soared as we listened to the earliest episodes of Batman, and to classics like The Lone Ranger, or The Shadow Knows, or to Lux Radio Theatre, precursors to the TV shows that would come later, like The Ed Sullivan Show and still later, CSI, FBI, American Idol, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and Masterpiece Theatre on PBS.

The Fire

Feeding the cook stove’s unrelenting appetite for wood was a chore without end. In winter we had the added challenge of chopping wood outside in sub-zero temperatures. The woodpile usually was covered in snow and ice that rendered the kindling we produced frustratingly difficult to light ... not welcome in a cold house first thing on a winter morning.

One afternoon just before we were leaving to visit a neighbouring farm family, I was told to fill the woodbox in the kitchen, ready for the next morning. Turns out snow had frozen to the kindling. Mom’s creative mind kicked in, as usual. She opened the oven and spread kindling on the open door to dry while we were away. It seemed like a good plan. When the family returned home, we kids were dawdling in the snow even though it was dark, while Mom headed inside.

She came running out screaming, “The house is on fire! The house is on fire!” My older sister, Carol, and I ran after the car as Dad pulled out of the driveway heading for an errand down the road. Dad raced back through the deep snow to the house, ordering us kids to stay outside.

A few anxious minutes later both our parents emerged laughing through their fits of coughing. The stove’s oven had been hot enough to ignite the kindling, filling the house with smoke. Fortunately, none of the burning wood had fallen from the open oven door onto the linoleum-covered wood floor, where it would have almost certainly set the house on fire.

Before going to bed at night, our parents would stoke that kitchen stove and a smaller pot-bellied stove in the living room with coal piled on top of red-hot wood embers. These smoldered away keeping the stoves warm through most of the night. They were barely warm by morning. Sometimes the temperatures outside dropped to 40 below F/C, occasionally even lower.

The deep snow in winter made it easier for Dad to harvest trees that he would convert the following summer into fence posts, fence rails and firewood. Gathering the wood was a welcome adventure for us kids.

Dad would take us out into the forest perched on a huge farm sleigh drawn by our two heavy workhorses, one a black Percheron (we think) called Pat and the other a grey Clydesdale (most likely) named Mike. That team could pull a farm sleigh through snow in the woods where our big tractor couldn’t begin to navigate. Their hooves were the size of pie plates and acted like snowshoes in the deep snow.

One summer, my sister Carol and I traced our winter route back through the forest to where Dad had cut a number of trees. We discovered how deep the snow had been. The stumps of those trees were almost as tall as us, yet that winter Dad had cut them off level with the top of the snow.

Nature’s Playground

Summers were awesome. When not busy with chores, there was a huge variety of interesting things available to pursue, limited only by our imaginations.

Among these:

▪   Building a creaky raft that we sailed on a brackish pond behind the outhouse. The pond was formed from snow melt in spring enhanced by rains in summer creating a stream that meandered through our barnyard before flowing past the outhouse and into that pond. It’s amazing we didn’t drown or come down with some dreadful ailment.

▪   Playing in our tree house built in a clump of Aspen behind our cow barn. We were starting on a fourth floor when Mom discovered it and demanded that we dismantle our fine work.

▪   Picking wild strawberries and blueberries on a knoll in our hay meadow and savoring their intensely distinctive flavors. We likely put a dent in the amount Mom was able to turn into preserves for treats come winter.

▪   Swimming in a shallow pond formed by a burned-out patch of moss (muskeg) on one corner of our farm. We found ourselves in deep trouble when we returned home with our bright white underwear, substituted for bathing suits, having been turned grey by the ash-colored water of the pond. And we were disciplined for swimming without permission.

▪   Exploring the unspoiled beauty of the evergreen and Aspen forest that surrounded our small farm. Often, we would flush out flocks of partridge and once were terrified when an aggressive Ruffled Grouse rushed at us in defense of its nest.

 ▪ Climbing the Aspen trees in our cow pasture and swinging from one to another, ten or even fifteen feet up. No, there were no nets or special landing pads beneath us, just patches of grass, exposed tree roots, rocks, and cow paddies, not all of them dry.

▪   Tending our huge garden in summer, a chore with a bonus. We’d often lay on our backs in the garden, chomping on fresh veggies while watching clouds swirl and dance above us. We were supposed to be weeding, thinning, and watering, and we did that some of the time. Fresh baby carrots thinned from the rows were scrumptious once wiped clean more or less, on our pants or shirts, as were fledgling radishes, and juicy little green peas squeezed from fresh pods ... delicious.

City Cousins

Occasionally our city cousins would visit. They thought it really cool to help with the chores. We encouraged them to hold that thought while we let them take our place to:

▪     Fork hay for the cows and horses,

▪     Spread grain for the chickens and turkeys,

▪    Prepare a soupy mixture of skim milk and chopped grain for the calves and pigs.

▪   Turn the handle on a machine called a separator used to separate raw milk from our eight to ten cows into skim milk and cream, the latter an important source of cash.

▪    Gather eggs from the chickens, then wash and count them.

▪    Draw water from the hand pump in pails and haul it to the troughs for the cows, horses, pigs, and chickens.

Despite our best efforts, none of our visitors jumped at the chance to help clean the manure from the cow and pig barns or the chicken coop. Instead, our visitors went searching for newborn kittens in the hayloft while we performed those pungent chores.

The star attraction for our visitors was trying their hand at milking a cow. They loved taking turns learning to squirt milk from a cow’s teat into the open mouths of kittens lined up in the aisle of the barn in anticipation.

For us, those chores weren’t quite so cool. Some were unrelenting daily demands, and thus aptly named chores. Full disclosure: our parents did far more of these than we ever did, although we complained a lot more.

Sometimes those chores earned us bonuses. One of these was an offer from Dad that if I was able to keep alive and raise a runt piglet from a new litter, he’d sell it and put that money toward a bike that I so desperately wanted. I did and he did. Amazing how a runt pig can be transformed into a bicycle.

Awesome Horses Some of our older neighbors at that time were still using workhorses for some of their farm work, even to plow fields, haul seeders and harvesters, and pull hay mowers and rakes. I mentioned earlier a winter job for our pair of heavy horses – Pat the Percheron and Mike the Clydesdale. In summer, they pulled a mower to cut and harvest the hay in our meadow, where the ground was always moist and soft. Our tractor would have sunk to its axles, but their big hooves cruised along easily. My sisters and I were allowed to sit on those big mammoths occasionally, holding on to the harnesses that Dad would throw onto them before putting those gentle giants to work.

Photo by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/My sisters and me on one of our draft horses, Pat, the Percheron (we think), and behind us, Mike, most likely part Clydesdale.hoto by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/

Some of our older neighbors at that time were still using workhorses for some of their farm work, even to plow fields, haul seeders and harvesters, and pull hay mowers and rakes.

I mentioned earlier a winter job for our pair of heavy horses – Pat the Percheron and Mike the Clydesdale. In summer, they pulled a mower to cut and harvest the hay in our meadow, where the ground was always moist and soft. Our tractor would have sunk to its axles, but their big hooves cruised along easily.

My sisters and I were allowed to sit on those big mammoths occasionally, holding on to the harnesses that Dad would throw onto them before putting those gentle giants to work.

Back To School

Fall meant a return to our one-room school. Millbank School accommodated between twelve and fifteen students in grades one to eight. The numbers varied by season; some of the older boys often were kept home by their parents to help with spring planting and fall harvesting.

We did miss losing our freedom, but the upside was spending more time with other kids who lived too far away to see often in summer.

Education at the time was inexact, even haphazard. A new teacher took charge of our single classroom almost every year. Teachers were in short supply and especially difficult to attract to the backcountry.

One year, a young male teacher arrived fresh out of what was called Normal School. He hadn’t graduated all that many months earlier from high school and had received six weeks of teacher training, after which he was turned loose on us. The Normal School system was an illusion invented by government to gloss over an endemic shortage of pedagogues. The products became known as Six-Week Wonders.

Some teachers were excellent; some weren’t. One even forced me to learn how to write with my right hand. I’m left-handed. It wasn’t pretty and her techniques would not be tolerated today. She’d hit my knuckles with a long ruler every time she caught me using my left hand to write, ridiculing me before the class, claiming lefties were mentally challenged. An upside was that she forced me to become a bit ambidextrous.

Winter posed challenges to schoolchildren. Our father instructed my sisters and I how to keep from getting lost in a blizzard while walking the one mile to and from school. We were instructed that when dealing with heavy blowing snow, one of us must hold onto the barbed wire between the fence posts, while holding hands with our siblings. Occasionally, it was a crap shoot when blizzards made it difficult to see the tops of the posts poking up through the deep snowdrifts, or to locate the connecting strings of barbed wire, often buried in snow. It was a good thing, therefore, that farmers were more attentive to keeping their fences and barns in good shape than they were about tending to the roads leading to their farms. We learned that almost every challenge in farm life can have a positive side if you allow it. Those blizzards were no exception. Each winter, snow driven by howling winds drifted into a creek valley next to our school, filling one side of the valley with hard-packed snow.

Photo by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/Winter was always an adventure for me and my sisters, Carol (left) and Betty Ann (centre).o by Steve: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-deer-eating-grass-397850/

One of our Six-Week Wonders devoted more time to field trips and sports days than to anything resembling the basic skills associated with an elementary school education. One day he took us on a field trip that, in fairness, became an extraordinary learning experience.

Our trek took us to a remote cabin occupied by a lone hermit deep in the forest, a few miles north of our farm as it turned out. We came away enthralled by a reclusive yet kindly man who lived off the land ... Off The Grid in today’s vernacular ... and was a talented carver with an impressive display of wild animal carvings he’d created. We learned that Anton Rumstead, the hermit carver, would come to our nearby hamlet, Tomahawk, to trade his carvings and the pelts he trapped in winter in exchange for enough provisions to keep him going.

Tricky Medicine

For those choosing to live in the wilderness, most medical needs, both urgent and routine, necessarily become do-it-yourself procedures. One day I fell and caused a deep cut under my left eye. Blood flowed like sacramental wine on Easter Sunday.

Before I knew it, there I was laying on the kitchen table, Dad holding me steady while Mom dipped thread and a sewing needle into a saucepan of boiling water.

Dad normally was a remarkably calm man, except that day. Regardless, he stitched me up with skill that could have drawn envy from micro-surgeons and did indeed gain a few compliments from doctors in the decades to follow.

There’s much to be said for today’s modern conveniences and advances in communication, science, medicine, health care, safety and respect for differences. During the early years of the 20th Century, notions of an Internet had entered few if any of the wildest sci-fi imaginations. Today, we’d feel hard pressed to live without its many features.

Growing up then presented challenges, to be sure. Looking back, it’s easy to exaggerate the benefits and minimize the disadvantages. But those experiences did bestow an abundance of valuable lessons. Prime among these is the importance of being happy. We also learned self-reliance, how to be resourceful, the insignificance of material things, and above all a deep and abiding respect for Nature.