Stories From Another Era By Margaret G. Hanna
Up at 5:00 am. Feed and water the horses. Grease the threshing machine. Check the drive belt for tension and wear. Fuel up the tractor. Do all the other chores – feed and milk the cows (give some of the milk to the barn cats), feed the chickens and pigs and turkeys. Scratch the dog’s ears.
Guess what? Your day has only begun.
Gulp down a huge breakfast of eggs, bacon, and piles of toast and jam, swallow a gallon of coffee, clap on your hat, and go out to meet the neighbours who have just arrived to help. Harness up the horses. Hitch them to the hay racks and the grain wagon. Throw the pitch forks on the racks, call “Giddy-up!” to the horses, and head out to the fields for another day of threshing.
Pitch sheaves onto the hay racks. Pitch them off the hay racks into the gnashing maw of the threshing machine. Watch the grain pour out of the spout. Take a load of grain into the elevator Repeat. Again and again.
Feed and water the horses, then into the house for dinner (that’s the noon meal in “rural speak”). Roast beef, potatoes, vegetables, salad, pies, and more coffee.
Back to the field. Check the fuel in the tractor. Check the belt tension. Take more grain into the elevator. Mid-afternoon break of coffee, sandwiches and cake, maybe cookies, too. Always, the water barrel at hand for thirsty men and horses.
Work till supper. Shut down the tractor. Loosen the drive belt. Drive the horses back to the farmyard. Unhitch and unharness them. Wipe them down. Feed and water them. Do all the other chores – feed and milk the cows (give some of the milk to the barn cats), feed the chickens and pigs and turkeys. Scratch the dog’s ears. Eat supper. Say good-by to the neighbours.
And then, do it all over again tomorrow.
It wasn’t any easier for the farmer’s wife and the women who came to help her. They, too, were up at 5:00 am to put the bread in the oven (they’d set the dough the night before). They cooked up platters of eggs and bacon and toast, brewed gallons of coffee. Breakfast done and cleared away, and – oh yes –the kids got ready and off to school, it was time to put the roast in the oven, peel buckets of potatoes, and make a few pies and cakes – all this on a wood-fired cook stove. Imagine how hot the house must have been! Dinner was a whirlwind of feeding ravenous men; the women had to wait till the men left before they could eat, but no dawdling because there was still mid-afternoon lunch to prepare and after that supper. And still, they couldn’t rest. They had household chores and children to tend as well as staring tomorrow’s bread using either sourdough or cakes of fresh yeast.
Margaret G. Hanna grew up on the farm her paternal grandfather homesteaded in 1908 in southwestern Saskatchewan. After 12 years of university, she worked as a professional archaeologist, first on several short-term contracts in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta, and finally as Curator of Aboriginal History at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, Regina. She retired in 2007 and moved to Airdrie AB where she lives with her husband and no pets.
She now uses her research skills to explore family and prairie history. For Margaret, writing is a portal to another dimension of reality. When she isn’t struggling to write, she gardens, reads, sews, and quilts. Her dream is one day to master the 5-string banjo, claw-hammer style.
Margaret’s books can be found through her website, A Prairie Perspective, and on Amazon.
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This is great! Loved it!
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Thanks Heidi. We are looking forward to sharing Margaret’s stories each month.
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