There’s a certain point you get to, in middle age or thereabouts, where you start asking yourself questions about times gone by. And if those times are far enough gone by, it can be hard to get answers, because there’s no one left who can give you any.
My mother died a couple of years ago, at age 88, and it’s only been in the last little while that I’ve realized that with her gone, there’s no one left for me to ask questions about the farm life I grew up with.
When I was a kid, living on a dairy farm in the southern Ontario countryside seemed normal. It’s what I was born in to, and I never thought about the life paths that led others before me to that place. I was born there and grew up there, and caught the school bus at the end of the laneway, and came home and did chores. There were enough others like me around that I didn’t feel special, or disadvantaged either. And of course, it never occurred to me to think about what came before my little life.
But five decades having passed, I find I’ve started asking myself some pretty basic questions, and I can tell I’m not going to get any answers.
My father was the eldest of three children. He had a younger brother and sister. Every day, he bicycled into the city, about eight miles, to go to school. In the winter, he boarded with relatives. When he finished high school, his educational journey ended. He stayed on the farm. There was, apparently, no other alternative. He was the oldest, so he stayed. His younger brother and sister both went to university when the time came. When they married, they wound up living several doors away from each other in a suburb of Toronto. Meanwhile, my father stayed on the farm, working 12 or 14 hours a day, never taking a holiday.
Why did my father have to stay on the farm? How was that communicated? Did his father sit him down one day and say something like, “Look, son, you’re the eldest, so you need to stay here and inherit all this?” Something like that?
I knew, in his lifetime, that he hadn’t chosen the life of a farmer. When he eventually retired, in his late 50s (there was no one left to tell him what he had to do), he changed directions entirely and started selling stocks, working for an investment company. My guess is he could have done this a lot earlier if he’d been able to follow his own desires. But I just don’t know.
Growing up, we lived in a pretty typical Canadian farmhouse. Our family lived in one side of the house, and my grandmother (my grandfather died before I was born) lived in the other side. There were kitchens, dining rooms and living rooms in each side, and then three bedrooms on each side at the top.
At least, I used to think this was a typical Canadian farmhouse. But why were there two sides to the house? Why were there matching types of rooms on both sides? I assume at some point, it was just one big house, before my father grew up and married and so on. But if that’s the case, what on earth did they do with all those rooms? I have spent a lot of time thinking back about the layout and trying to figure it out. How it all worked. I think there must have been some rooms tacked on here and there over the years. The layout of the farmhouse is a great example of something I took completely for granted as a child, and have no understanding of at all as an aging adult. And there’s no one left who can explain it to me.
The happiest memories of my childhood are all based on interacting with animals. As a busy dairy farm operation, the calves needed looking after, and the “calf barn” in the barnyard was my own little domain. With lots of young calves, bales of hay and straw, a feed bin and even electricity, I especially remember the barn from winter. It was always a refuge from the cold, a cheery spot I visited every morning before school, every afternoon after school, and in the evening before I got ready for bed. Yes, I loved taking care of my little calves.
And they really were my calves. They certainly had nothing to do with their mothers anymore. When I think back to those days, I can hardly believe we would drag the poor things away from their mothers a couple of days after birth. I remember some farms we knew where they took them away literally after birth, believing that to actually be kinder to the mothers in the long run. We left mother and calf together for a couple of days. Was that actually better? In some ways it must have been worse, for that bond to form between mother cow and calf, and then to rip it away by taking the calf elsewhere.
And what about the bull calves? We didn’t keep them. We sold them and I think they went away and got raised for veal. I have a very vague memory of a rattling truck that came once a month or so and picked up these poor creatures.
My entire memory of my childhood years is based on how much fun it was to work with animals all the time, but when I look back now, I can’t help but see all these sinister elements. Taking calves away from their mothers. Selling bull calves to live a miserable existence until they were slaughtered for veal. Wasn’t there any other way we could have handled some of these matters? Was it just conventional wisdom back then that this was what you did with dairy calves? I don’t know who to ask.
We had two farm dogs when I was growing up. The first was a collie named Lassie, and the second a golden retriever named Honey. What we lacked in inspiration for naming dogs, we made up for in finding names for the dozens of cats that were always around. I suppose that today, these would be called feral cats, but to us they were just barn cats, the kind you’d find around any farm. Unlike the calves, I think these barn cats really did have the good life. Milk fresh from the cows, eating all kinds of scraps my mother would send down from the kitchen, lots of places to chase mice, and any number of nice corners to curl up in. In the winter, I remember the cats curling up in a big pile to keep warm. And they also got lots of attention, from all of us. One cat, a handsome smoky grey cat named Wilbur, actually moved into our house for a while. I guess he thought it looked more fun than sharing the barn with the others.
All of these cats had names: Wilbur, Gertrude, Franklin, Samuel, and then every possible variation on Spot, Boots, Ginger, Fluffy and on and on. Why did we let so many cats accumulate? I know: nobody wants to spend money on barn cats. You don’t pay the vet to spay them or whatever. But I look back and wonder why on earth we didn’t make the investment once in a while because having 30 or 40 cats around just seems excessive in retrospect. There was a cat that was black, but had white over the eye and several white patches. She was just called The Black and White Cat. I don’t know if that was just some kind of “placeholder,” but she was around for years, and always stayed The Black and White Cat. Why didn’t we come up with a name for her at some point? Could we just not think of something better than that? This continues to bother me in my memory, 50 years later.
There are things you can’t kid yourself about any more at a certain point in your life. For me, that point is in my late 50s. I look back at my farming childhood and teenage years and my view of it all has no more sentiment attached to it. I don’t have a negative point of view either. But I see it all realistically now, and I’d like to understand more parts of it.
I wish I knew how my father’s life and choices, or lack thereof, worked. I wish I understood how the farmhouse was put together and why. I wish I didn’t feel bad about how we dealt with the calves, and maybe understanding more about the circumstances would help.
And I’d sure like to know why we didn’t ever give a name to The Black and White Cat.
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(Photo: Hunter Desportes/ flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
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