More Family Stories
Posted in Family History, My Father's Stories, My Mother's Stories on January 21st 2004 by Randy Reichardt:: This time out, a pair of short pieces from me dear old M and Da:
- Dad: One incident that comes to mind was when I was about 11 or 12 years old, in the late 1930s. We always had a big garden at the back of our house on Berry Street, in St Boniface, Manitoba. One day I was told to water the garden, but instead, I just stuck the hose in the ground and let it run for a while! Then it occurred to me that my Dad had to pay for the water, so I stopped with the hose in the ground and watered the garden! I really felt bad about that afterwards.
Mom: Whoever wrote the words to the song, “Summertime and the livin’ is easy”, wasn’t in my mother’s kitchen 60 years ago. Living was certainly not easy for her. I still picture her working in a very small kitchen, wood stove putting out the heat in an already sweltering room. She was canning food. To keep her family fed throughout the upcoming long, cold winte,r she would can somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 jars of food. She would can corn on the cob, kernel corn, peas, peas and carrots, carrots, tomatoes, chickens, peaches, pears, plums and strawberries. She would make strawberry jam, raspberry jam, grape jelly, grape jam, blueberry jam. If you could name it, I swear my mother could can it.
I receive daily inspirational messages from Oprah. I think today’s thought is very fitting, in helping describe how my mother loved us all. “Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality…the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.” –Jose Ortega y Gasset, philosopher
