Rural Routes, Blog Version

For 25 years, from 1982 to 2007, I wrote a weekly column that appeared in the Portage Daily Graphic and the Herald Leader Press, both published out of Portage la Prairie, MB.  Entitled ‘Rural Routes’, the column was mostly about day-to-day life on the farm.  In 2000, I self-published a compilation of excerpts from those columns, although I continued writing ‘Rural Routes’ for seven more years.

REWIND:

(This appeared in September 1982. My husband and I were living on the family farm. No children yet.)

You can tell autumn is here when:

The combines are working late into the night and in the darkness you can see the headlights of grain trucks moving between field and bin. Some farmers in the area are finished; most are somewhere near the middle, finished with the cereals but with the oilseeds yet to go. Fall fieldwork has started and some are burning the straw in their fields.

The big yellow school buses are making their twice-daily runs again and school activities are well underway.

The first of the American hunters have arrived. As the migratory bird hunting seasons open, we can expect more and more visitors from south of the border. They don’t call us  ‘game country’ for nothing.

The cattle are restless, sensing that it is time to move. Pastures are thinning, especially after the frosts recently experienced in the area. Mornings may find an entire herd crowded in front of the exit gate, waiting for the gate to be opened.

The once gay and colorful flowerbeds are stiff with frost, the dahlias and marigolds the first to show the damage. Gardens turn from green to brown and the more industrious gardeners have already begun to clear them. Newly dug potatoes and onions dry in the sun. Basement and spare bedroom floors are covered with green and partially ripe tomatoes.

Clubs are planning reorganization meetings. Church and community groups plan fowl suppers. School-age children go back to music lessons.

The new hens start laying eggs, small and good for baking, but not yet up to breakfast standards. Chickens find their way from hen house to freezer despite their squawks of protest.

The sun sets by 7:30 p.m. A new season of television awaits us and, in the hum of a working furnace, we sense the coming of winter.

FAST FORWARD

I have always loved the season I wrote about in this piece. Fall is both a time of completion (the harvest) and a new beginning (the resumption of school after the summer break). It is a season of transition and glorious colour.

But times have changed. It is more than thirty years, after all, since these words first appeared in print.

It is not uncommon these days for the harvest to be completed before September 1. Depends on the year, of course. Something to do with the changing climate? Who knows? Nowadays many local farmers plant winter wheat and harvest it in July. That would have been unheard of thirty years ago. Winter wheat wouldn’t germinate in our climate. It does now.

While I can still watch the combines, I no longer have a vested interest in what they are doing. We have rented out our crop land.

The big yellow school buses are still on the roads, but the distances they travel between stops are longer.  There are fewer children. There are fewer adults, too. We don’t see yellow school buses on our road any longer. I miss those days, if for no other reason that being on a school route meant road maintenance was a priority.

The American hunters still come. Some of them have become family friends. Years ago, a hunter from Minnesota got permission to set up camp on my father’s land during hunting season. Now his son, already a middle-aged man, comes every year. When my brother’s daughter recently married, the hunter and his wife made the trip north of the border to attend the wedding.

We haven’t had chickens for many years now. We stopped buying chickens in the spring, although we had laying hens for years after that. I don’t miss the time spent in the late summer and early fall  ‘doing the chickens’. Euphemistic way of saying cutting off their heads, de-feathering and disemboweling.

Some things change. Some do not.