On a trip to the city, I noticed an abandoned farmhouse by the side of the road. The roof was sagging, the paint faded, the windows broken, and the front door hung ajar. Memories of the farmhouses that were a big part of my life through the years flooded back.
It's hard to imagine that we will become the past one day. People will drive by our homes and wonder about the families that once lived there.
New homes today are in stark contrast to those settler farmhouses. It’s common now for one to four people to occupy a large house, while homes back then likely had five to ten inhabitants.
Homesteaders didn’t have a lot of material possessions, so a small house seemed adequate. One phrase Mom always used was, “that’s sufficient.”
That isn’t to say that people then didn’t long for things, but they weren't bombarded with the options we are today.
A century ago, farmers weren’t overly concerned about architecture or aesthetics; they needed a roof over their heads, often within a short timeframe dictated by Mother Nature. They didn’t have to follow building codes either.
Many were immigrants who brought what they could fit in a steamer trunk.
Try fitting your belongings in this.
My paternal grandparents truck.
That generation said they didn’t know anything different. No one else they knew had anything either. You don’t miss what you never had. There are discoveries and inventions to come that the current generation doesn’t know about, so we also won't miss what we never had.
In my mind, I probably romanticized life in the house by the side of the road.
I pictured a family sitting around a stone fireplace in the evening. The mom is hand-stitching something, the kids are doing arithmetic, and the father is rocking in his chair, the scent of tobacco wafting from the pipe in his hand. The reality might have been very different.
As their families grew, people added to existing structures or built new homes.
My maternal Grandpa and his older sons logged and sawed lumber and built a new house in 1942.
A windmill and a battery-operated power plant provided electricity for the house. Power to rural areas was brought through by the government starting in 1950.
Eavestroughs directed rainwater into the basement cistern. Water was then drawn up to the kitchen using a hand pump. Running water and sewer were installed in the 1960s.
Grandpa and Grandma’s new house west of Leask was an imposing structure. It boasted five bedrooms upstairs, hardwood floors and trim and a veranda.
The decor would have been minimal by today’s standards: double beds, small dressers, handmade shelving, wooden chairs by the beds and small closets.
A white roller blind with sheer curtains was sufficient, as they never slept in.
Mom was thirteen when the new house was built and she lived there until she married Dad when she was eighteen. Their wedding reception was held in this house.
My uncle and aunt took over the farm when Grandpa and Grandma retired to Leask. They raised their family of five there. When they, in turn, retired, the house was sold and it subsequently changed hands a few times. It has been maintained by the current owners, though, and it still looks beautiful over eighty years later.
All these homes had massive gardens. Their gardens included the standard vegetables plus fruit trees, and raspberry, strawberry and pumpkin patches. Those patches took on a life of their own.
Many memories were made in the farmhouse east of Leask, SK where I grew up.
It wasn’t overly large, but my paternal grandparents raised a family of nine there, and then my parents spent fifty-one years there, raising five children.
My parents lived in the farmhouse with Dad’s parents for the first two years of their married life. Grandma was widowed after her and Grandpa retired to a house on the outskirts of Leask. She returned to stay with my parents on the farm in her last years. Life came full circle for her.
It was a log house that Grandpa built one summer while they lived in a granary. The house was added onto and upgraded through the years although running water was never installed.
Older siblings grew up and left home as more kids came along. If you were the oldest in line, you might have gotten your own room or, more likely, had a younger sibling move into the vacancy in your bed. I never did get a room to myself growing up.
We had that same décor, and I remember the white roller blinds on the screened windows and a sheer curtain swaying in the summer breeze. I don’t remember one time getting up before my parents.
Babies were born there a century ago, and family gatherings were held for all occasions. Thousands of meals were served, and hundreds of canning jars were filled and lugged up and down the root cellar steps.
Mom made multiple school lunches daily on the small kitchen counter for forty years. My siblings and I ran down the lane to catch the bus. Mom said I braided my hair as I went, multitasking at its finest.
The house is gone. I have a small chunk of charred wood that I picked off the ground after it was burnt down, and the rubble was buried in July of 2018. The ground where it stood was ploughed over for agricultural use.
The house had seen its day, but my heart still hurt as I stood there, tears streaming down my face as memories swirled around me in the prairie wind.
The Hubs and I live in a home built in the 1940s. It is the house Grandma bought in town as a widow. The small four-foot-wide closets extend five feet deep under the sloped ceiling upstairs. It’s not a walk-in closet; it’s a crawl-in closet.
In truth, though, I could fit everything I wear in that closet.
A cistern remains in the basement, but running water had been installed in the 1960s, so we never needed to use it. Two of the bedrooms still have pull-string ceiling lights.
💬 Here are a few thoughts to ponder.
Today, many of us have so much stuff. How did we get to this point? Did our parents, with the best intentions, instill in us the idea that if we have more than they did growing up, we’d be guaranteed happiness?
The next time you see an abandoned house by the side of the road, take a minute to think about what life was like then.
Have you ever wondered what living during a different generation would have been like? If you could go back in time, where and when would you choose?
🔗🎤 Listen to the audio version of this episode.
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