Victor Carl Friesen - The Gift of Country Life

THE GIFT OF COUNTRY LIFE Victor Carl Friesen NATURAL HERITAGE BOOKS
TORONTO Copyright 2005 Victor Carl Friesen All rights reserved. No portion of this book, with the exception of brief extracts for the purpose of literary or scholarly review, may be reproduced in any form without the permission of the publisher. Published by Natural Heritage / Natural History Inc.
P.O. Box 95, Station O, Toronto, Ontario M4A 2M8
www.naturalheritagebooks.com All colour photography is by the author; black and white photographs are from the authors collection unless otherwise identified. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Friesen, Victor Carl The gift of country life / Victor Carl Friesen. ISBN 1-897045-07-7 1.

Farm lifeSaskatchewanPoetry. 2. Country lifeSaskatchewanPoetry. I. Title. acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

We acknowledge the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Association for the Export of Canadian Books. To the memory of my mother, Anna Friesen CONTENTS

Haying was still done with a mower and rake drawn by two horses, and the hay put up in stacks (the horses would also pull our buggy and wagon in summer and bobsleigh and cutter in winter); livestock were watered at a bucket-and-pulley well, hand-dug in those days (ours was a quarter mile from the yard because our household pump well went dry periodically); crops, such as they were on sandy land, were cut with a binder and stooked in fall (a separator and lively crew came out to thresh them, leaving straw stacks in our field or pasture); and dried trees were cut and hauled home to be sawed up for fuel for the kitchen range and living-room heater. My father and older brother hauled logs as well from ravines along the South Saskatchewan River. The highlight of each summer was a fishing trip to the river, six miles away, providing food for the table and a break from the usual workaday routine. Winters in the 40s decade were cold and blizzardy enough that from Christmas to Easter I worked at my high-school correspondence courses at home and sought amusement in skiing, on homemade skis, across the country in the blue of evening, always observant of the colours of snow and the wildlife flourishing about me. Things changed rapidly after mid-century. Mechanized equipment made for larger land holdings, doing away with a lot of neighbourly effort in getting jobs done.

Farms became electrified and modernized with plumbing and the latest home appliances. Country schools closed and children were bused to town for their education; social activities came to be centred in towns, too. The pace of life quickened and community spirit was not so localized as before. For me personally, the changes were also marked. My father died in 1950, and an auction sale the next year ended our farming operation. Since I had then completed grade twelve, I left the farm to attend normal school and, the following autumn, began my teaching career.

My siblings, older than I, had already gone. Mother also left, for the city to do day-work in winters. But the farm was not sold. It was always there for us to return to. Mother was the most faithful to the home place, going back each spring, as soon as the snow melted, to resume her country life, a gift she would not relinquish. To her it was the best place to beeven without electricity and running water.

She enjoyed getting water from the squeaky pump at the well and lighting a coal-oil lamp. She prided herself on having a small workable hand that could squeeze inside a lamp chimney with some crumpled paper to clean itthat made a squeaky kind of sound, too. Ever the farm.... She died in 1988. It has been said that you can take a boy out of the farm but you cannot take the farm out of a boy. Eventually I bought the land where I was born, not willingly letting go of country life either.

Although I now live in Rosthern, just five miles away, I go home to renew my inner being, to think clearly those thoughts that tend to get muddled in my brain in an urban setting. And there are always some puttering jobs or relaxing things to domowing the yard, pruning the trees, walking nostalgically to the hay meadow, sensing the great night coming on. The seventeen poems here, describing this rural world, are mostly in traditional blank verse, grouped into seasonal activities or observations. The circle of the year, after all, is the essence of country life. About a third of the poems detail activities of the older way of farming, another third focus on my puttering work of the present day, and a final third hail eternal nature, ever the same, which links all country life together whatever the era. Nature, as Henry David Thoreau has said, is one and continuous.

Fittingly, the last poem, as a separate afterword, deals with both past and present times as well as their ongoing relationship to nature, in tribute to the one who most appreciated The Gift of Country Life. Farm cows at ease about their winters hay, drawn from round, solid bales amid the snow, recall, if dimly, in their bovine brain, far pastures summery with smells and now time-capsuled by each bales slow chemistry. Walking to the empty farmyard with the spring night coming onan April evening coldness there, and daytimes fluffy clouds but dark, thin carded remnants floating byI pressed through poplar saplings, sprung from garden plots unplowed alongside aspen bushes, and unmowed, too. Dirty snow lay thick in swatches, molded, scalloped, melted down, left from the sculpted drifts of winter, crystallized about the saplings, crunched and shattered by my steps. Thus I approached along a path that led up to my home of boyhood (and of birth): the greyed house standing still as it had stood, deserted but not lonely, so I thought, with ageless trees about it (planted in an ell that marked a lawn), with dense adjoining thickets closing in upon the yard, snug woodland haven of ruffed grouse and hooting owl. The old house seemed at peace in the pale light of dusk, at one with Nature and acclimated.

Now darkness settled in at last, on yard, the trees (fusing their limbs), the greying house that loomed against the sky: a honking, then, of migrant geese in slanted skeins, sailing low over the wood and calling softly each to each and flying onward through the night; and stirrings elsewhere, as I listened, of raccoons that shambled from the house before me theirs, presumably, and mine (and something to be shared)a welcome, in a way, to stay and visit. Dusk. April night descending. A cold mist greying things. Distant bushes blurred, obscured. Last years grasses sodden at my feet.