Olden days

When I think of the "olden days", I think of things like putting your foot in turpentine if you stepped on a nail.  What that did I'll never know, but it saved the day when you lived out in the country and couldn't get to a hospital.  For a bee sting you were to apply mud...in first aid we were taught to apply ice...I guess those two treatments have a few similiarities.  For a bad cough, you were put in bed with a sheet draped over you and a chair beside the bed.  An electric tea kettle without an automatic shut off would be boiling away beside you under the sheet and you would be getting a really intense steaming.  The steamings worked great, so I hope people still do them today.  The only problem was that parents would have to take turns sitting up to make sure the tea kettle didn't boil dry.  The only skin care beauty creams I can remember were Noxzema, Nivea and Ponds.  Noxzema was quite useful for sunburns, at least it cooled things down.  Hand soap was Zest and shampoo was shampoo without conditioner.

For a toothache, apparently you went to the baking supply cupboard and found the cloves. I'm also not sure what cloves would do except  be strong enough to make your eyes water so you forgot about the pain. I never had to do this because I was lucky enough to have pretty good check-ups.  To cleanse cuts and scrapes, there was nothing but iodine, mercurochrome, or hydrogen peroxide. All these antiseptics are still around today, but I am told they do more harm than good.  You probably know that iodine hurts worse than the injury itself, is a dark brown, and stains the skin.  I can remember always cringing and waiting to see what would be brought out when it came to cleaning and bandaging. I usually begged them not to use iodine.  At my grandma's house, she would apologize because all she had was mercurochrome.  It was red and stained the skin too, but it was pretty much pain free...and such fun to paint on.  I never worried at her place.  As I got to grade three in Aspen Country school, the teacher, Mrs. Polzer would use iodine and I began to realize that if the wound was fresh, the iodine would really sting, but if the wound was a little older, it might not hardly hurt at all.  Hydrogen peroxide doesn't hurt or stain and is quite fun to watch as it fizzes up over and over, appearing to kill the germs.  There was no such thing as a liquid or spray bandage and no one had heard of Crazy Glue to put on cracked fingertips.  Today, all that's recommended for cleaning a wound is saline, if that.  Ozonol was my dad's all time favorite, especially for a burn.  It really did seem to work, but again they tell me especially on a large burn, not to use it.  I see now there is an ozonol with antibiotic ointment in it...guess who recommended it to me?  My mom.

In the olden days, there was no such thing as being politically correct.  We sang "Oh Canada" every morning in school, followed by reciting the Lord's Prayer together in unison.   At the end of the day, we sang "God Save the Queen".  Local people who lived on reserves were called Indians.  Some of these people even called themselves Indians.  The common term for mental health centres was "nut house", "looney bin", or "insane asyllum".  By extension, someone diagnosed with a mental health condition was a "nut", "nutty as a fruitcake", or a "retard".  If that wasn't bad enough, nicknames were rampant, especially for those who might be a little different.  I can think of one nickname, such as "total loss" because it rhymed with the person's last name.  Or "boots" because when teased the person would try to hit or kick the tormenters with big winter boots on.  Other nationalities and races got their own nicknames, such as "bohunks","niggers" and "japs".   If you don't believe me, just watch an old black and white war time movie.  I'm not sure that the average person knew what racism was until decades later.  Today, take my word for it, calling someone any of these names is considered impolite, unacceptable and inappropriate.  In those days, no one seemed to realize or care, I expect, how harmful it really was.  Bullying was dealt with, but could be ignored because it was the small stuff of a peaceful country that had recently been involved with an extremist on the other side of the world, Adolph Hitler.  Most people, especially in the rural areas, wouldn't put up with bad behaviour, so spanking was alive and well.  Most bullies were tattled on and eventually met with the strap.  If they got the strap at school, they would often get it twice as hard at home.  Somehow, although it sounds bad, it seemed to be quite effective in some cases.

My grandma only showed me her strap once...well, my cousin, Susan and I.  One look was enough to make us stand up and take notice.  We had eaten an entire box of maraschino cherry chocolates that someone had given to her and grandpa as a gift.  She was not impressed.  To this day, I still love maraschino cherry chocolates.  :-)

T.V. came out before I was born I think, probably in the early 1950's.  My dad and mom were proud because they were one of the first families in the community to get one.  You can't imagine what a big deal that was in those days, unless your family had one too.  I don't remember my grandpa having alot to say, but I do remember him and my dad comparing notes because they too had bought a T.V. earlier than many others.   I think it was almost like when computer games started to thrive in the early 1980's and anyone who had an Atari really felt good about being the first to own one.  That phenomenon has carrier through to today....being the first for Blackberry's and iPhones is a huge status symbol in our culture.

I'm not sure if kids really forgave their parents for spanking them, but they had to accept the situation.  I only ever had two spankings of any significance.  Once was by my dad for leaving the barn door open.  The bull got in with the cows and wrecked the barn.   The barn was inside a fenced area, so if the bull was visiting,  I have to wonder how come us two little kids were even inside the fence to get to the barn in the first place.  Dad, who was the love of my life,  put me over his knee and gave me about two taps on the butt.  The only thing that really hurt was my feelings.  Of course, I pleaded innocent and blamed my little brother, who incidentally never got a spank...But, I was the oldest and should have known better...even if I was a girl.  Dad never, ever laid a hand on me in anger again in my entire life.  Another time, it was by my mom.  My little brother and I had eaten all the peas in the pea patch.  We knew we would be in trouble so climbed high in two trees and hid.  We were at the edge of the farm yard, next to the open field.   We could hear everybody calling for us, but we wouldn't answer.  We knew darn well we were going to be in big trouble. Finally, close to dusk, my older brother found us.  We were not exactly popular at that point.  I don't remember having any insight into the fact that we had scared the wits out of our family, including the hired man, Bob Klein.  We were about six and four years old.  Mom did spank us more than dad, but she got to be with all four of us all day, every day.  She usually got frustrated by our fighting and broke out the wooden spoon or the hair brush.  The hair brush wasn't usually too effective because it would break.  We usually quit whatever we'd been fighting about fairly quickly after that.

There were all sorts of funny little sayings too.  They sound bad, but were mostly jokes and relieved the tension of a hard life.   For instance, "I'll hit you so hard, you'll starve to death bouncing" was more of a joke than anything.  Something could be as "scarce as hen's teeth".   For those with bucked teeth, they were said " to be able to eat apples through a picket fence".  "Four eyes" was the term for someone wearing thick coke-bottle bottom glasses.  If you asked someone where they were going, they might answer, "crazy, do you want to come along?" The outdoor toilet was called the "biffy".  I loved my grandparents' outhouse because it always had funny signs in it,like "be a sweetie and wipe the seatie".  It had a big hole and a little hole, so was a "two-holer".  People used the Eaton's or Sear's catalogue for toilet paper and lamented their suspicions that the cold weather caused their hemmorrhoids.  At their farm, the coyotes would start to howl once it got dark.  As I got older, I was expected to visit the outhouse by myself if I needed to go there at night.  They had it situated at least a couple hundred feet from the door, and  up against their 'forest'.  You could take a flashlight, but it was just the worst situation for me to go out there after dark, and I hated it.  For a long time, I could coerce my little brother into going with me, but after awhile, even he wouldn't go.

My grandpa was norwegian and taught us a few words like 'oofta' which doesn't really mean anything, it's just an expression.  He pronounced it 'hoofta', so that's how we said it.  He also taught us,  'forstagen' which means 'do you understand' and 'go leg da hound', which means 'go lay down dog'.  Grandma was scottish and said things like 'folly that car' or 'swally that drink'.  I didn't think either of them had any kind of accent, but they might have and I would have never noticed.

Stories about the Great Depression were fading away by the 1950's, but we still heard from grandpa of people wearing rubber boots made out of pieces of tire and tied on with binder twine.  We were told of children who took lard and pepper sandwiches to school for their lunches.  We heard how farmers were the best off because at least they could grow their own food and had livestock.  People in the towns were not nearly as fortunate.  We knew people who never owned a vehicle other than a little tractor, which they used to go to town with.  

The olden days were great, but like some jokes, you had to be there.


 

Kid Stuff

I think I've been somewhat of an idiot most of my life.   For instance, when I get with my sister, Lynda, for any length of time, we inevitably get to laughing uncontrollably. We seem to be hardwired for it and really have to watch ourselves or it will rear it's head at any given moment when we're together.   In fact, once riding with her in the back of the car with our husbands up front, I nearly choked to death, I was laughing so hard.  She says the dumbest things that make me laugh and I do the same to her I guess.  Along with our brother, we used to get into these fits at the worst possible moments...Like when the minister would stay for a meal. All we had to do was look at each other across the table or have one of us sneak off a blip of a giggle and we'd be lost.  My brother, Doug, was famous for letting off those little giggle blips, just to provoke us, and there was no stopping once we got started..The more we tried to straighten up and look anywhere else but at each other, or the minister, or our parents, the worse it became.  Mercifully, eventually the meal would be over and we could leave the table.  I am pretty sure Mom and Dad felt like giving all of us idiots away at those particular moments.

My poor little sister.., I taught her to say swear words when she was only two years old.  I am eight years older than her, so she was my little sidekick.  When she first learned to talk, it was great to tell her to say "......" and she would, and it made me laugh every time.  Remember, that was right around the time of the swearing extravaganza at school...Geez, I was not only an idiot, I was bad!  I wasn't always bad, sometimes, I was just plain dumb.  I broke my arm riding the wheel of a big old ancient wooden wagon wheel.  You know the kind with metal framing around wooden spokes and axles. The wagon lay on it's side with the wheel sticking straight up in the air, right next to a tall poplar tree.  This was perfect, because us kids could take turns using the tree to propel ourselves round and round like a merry-go-round.  At one point, there was a fatal flaw to this game though because I accidentally caught my arm between the wheel and the tree and snap!... the tree won.  I lost out and had to have my arm put in a cast. 

Other silliness that was just plain moronic, was once and only once, while playing out in the pasture with the other kids, I got thirsty.  I thought it was so smart to just take a drink out of the slough.  You know, the same one the cows drank out of and that was right next to where they relieved themselves.  Some neighbour kid found this out, and told me I'd probably have tadpoles growing in my stomach after that.  Last time for drinking out of the slough!  Now that I know about E. Coli, it was a good thing I didn't wind up with something much worse than baby frogs! 

In grade one, about 1960,  my teacher was the now dearly departed Mr. Eli Panchuk.  He was reduced to tying me to my desk in our one-room country school, because I was wandering around the classroom far too much.  All I wanted to do was look at the pretty, enticing world maps laid out on the big table at the side of the room, just like the older kids got to do.  I was only six years old and didn't see the need for sitting in one spot all day long.  I knew why I was wandering around, but couldn't exactly convince him about my reasoning at the time.  It was an embarrassing experience though and one I'll never forget.  Mr. Panchuk forgave me as the years went by, maybe because I got straight A's.  When I grew up, he inevitably greeted me with, "how's my favorite student?"  I was always suspicious that he said the same thing to all his Thatch Creek students though.  The Thatch Creek kids were a special little group to him, I think, because we all moved together to the big town school, Reynolds Central. He was the grade seven teacher there and I was in Grade three.  I stapled my finger one day at the new school and made it bleed.  Guess who I went searching for to save me?  Of course, my favorite teacher, Mr. Panchuk.

The country school was one big room with a row or part of a row for each grade of kids.  Grades one and two were in the first row on the left, and each row over had a higher grade, all the way up to the grade nines who were seated on the far side of the room.  All we had was adult-sized desks, so little people had to share.  In my case, it was another grade oner, a boy named Ricky H. and I.  He and I tolerated each other, because really, I was madly in love at six years old with one of the big boys, Bernard S..  He was so handsome in my eyes, but he barely even noticed me except once when we were playing forts at the back of the school yard.  I happened to be on his team with another big boy, Leroy M.  The big kids also played kick-the-can with us and that made us little ones feel pretty special and definitely included.

The country school had separate boys' and girls' cloak rooms.  In those days, they had such classic names for things unlike nowadays when we call the same thing, the 'boot room' or just plain old 'closet'.  The cloak rooms were big and had windows high up.  They were, you guessed it, where our coats, boots and metal lunch kits were put.  I remember there was enough room for all the girls to be in there at the same time and this was also where the bathrooms were.  The bathrooms were a single cubicle and the toilet was stand-alone and metal.  About 20 feet down the toilet hole was some sort of chemical liquid to contain the waste.  
 
During reading class, we read the "Dick and Jane" reader.  We took turns reading out loud in a little group at the front of the room.  There would be about six of us from grades one to three or four.  I would speed through my part and then get bored stiff listening to the others trying to sound out the words.  You have to remember that there were big kids in our group that still hadn't moved beyone grade one or two.  That's how it was in those days.  Phonics was the name of the game and was practiced to the letter.  One day  my friend, Vivian, who was a year or so older than me, came back from the bathroom and whispered to me that there was a magazine left in the girl's bathroom.  I guess she could tell I wasn't enjoying the reading class.  If they'd let me be the person to read the whole book out loud by myself, I'd have been a much happier girl, but that wasn't how the rest of them could get a chance to learn.  I understood the rationale and tried so hard to be patient, but face it, I was bored to tears.

I have no idea how the magazine got there, but I was very interested in the prospect of it.  After all, anything would be better than the listening to these painfully slow reading sessions, and the teacher would always let us leave the room for a trip to the bathroom.  I put up my hand and asked.  He nodded, "of course".  I went in and seated myself  on the commode, then picked up the glossy magazine off the floor and started looking at all the pictures.  Here goes the idiot again... I'm afraid I lost track of the time, which wasn't hard to do because I didn't own a watch. I was so engrossed in reading something truly interesting, besides Sally, Spot and Puff, that the teacher had to send somebody to knock on the door and check to see if I'd fallen in. I was blonde, pale, embarrassed and by the time I exited the cubicle, beet red.. When I think about it, I guess kids really could have fallen in, since it was a high, adult-sized toilet seat with no stool.  I was perfectly fine and reluctantly returned to the group at the front of the room.  They were still struggling to read and not even half way done the story.  See....Spot.... Run...  I tried to look non-chalant, never admitting that I'd been reading something superb and worldly and INTERESTING and moving it along myself at just the right pace.

At lunch time every day in the country school, we all lined up to fill our cups or glasses with drinking water from a big crock at the front of the room.  It had a small spigot with either a button to press, or a lever to turn...can't remember which.  These were the days before the running water we so easily take for granted now.  Come to think of it, I don't remember washing my hands there at all, but we must have...there must have been a basin with a pail at least.  Many homes had a well with a hand pump inside the house...at least we did and so did my grandmother, and attached somewhere near the kitchen sink.  We also had a 'slop pail' somewhere in the kitchen, like under the sink to collect everything biodegradable for the garden. You know, vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, egg shells, etc.  We were environmentally conscious long before it  was even in fashion.  Anyhow, after those reading sessions, getting to work the spigot and fill my cup and then eat my lunch were really things to look forward to.

I vividly remember a most embarrassing incident however, that happened to me one winter's day inside the country school.  I was lucky enough to inherit cast-off clothes from my Mom's youngest sister who was only ten years older than me.  (That's the idiot part).  I had on a pair of her houndstooth (black and white checked) pants that were a little too big, (ya think?), so had a big safety pin holding them together at the waist.  Underneath, I had on a pair of her red, long underwear, also way too big.  I had probably made up my mind I was wearing them and there would be no way anybody at home would have been able to change my mind.  I was so thrilled to have the new clothes!  As I was standing in the water line-up like we did the same way every day at lunch time, I was flitting around and not paying attention, I guess.  All of a sudden, without any warning, my pants fell down, right down around my ankles!  There I stood for one split second with nothing on but my red, long underwear and in front of the entire class!  My face got instantly hot, so I know it turned the same crimson as my underwear.  I was so flustered and fumbled around frantic to get things righted.  There was a snort and some smirks and I wanted to kill somebody then die myself.  I didn't really understand what had happened.  What a stupid, lousy safety pin....had I not shut it quite right?  Had it caught on something and opened when I didn't notice?   I was very quiet for the rest of the day and  I NEVER wore either of those articles of clothing in public EVER again.  Not one person from school spoke of that disastrous day and I was secretly very relieved and oh, so thankful!

About forty years later, when I was a teacher myself...the same emotions I had experienced that day returned, but on a much smaller scale.  At the end of a particularly long day, I had one of my quietest students come up to me.  She said, "Can I tell you something?"  I said, "of course".  She pointed to the bottom of my pantleg.  There hanging by nothing more than static electricity was a dryer sheet for all the world to see.  Oh brother...

A life-changing event occurred for me at one of our evening Christmas concerts at Thatch Creek school.  The whole group of students were on stage singing Christmas Carols with all our families sitting in the audience.  One of the big girls, either Sonia or Leona was playing the piano.  We eagerly awaited the appearance of Santa Clause who was to arrive at minute.  Suddenly, the older girl standing next to me, decided it was time I learned the truth.  She just blurted it out...."There is no Santa Clause, he's just one of the neighbour men dressed up".  I was never so mad at anybody in my whole life.  I called her a liar.  In fact, I told her to stop lying.  She laughed and gave me this incredulous look like how could I possibly continue to cling to such a naive and infantile idea.  When Santa did show up, he laughed and said  'ho ho ho' just like usual.  He brought us all something like nuts and a jap orange, just like we expected.  I was thrilled and marched straight to Mom and Dad the minute I could get to them.  I told them point blank...."she said......".  They began shushing me like crazy and trying to whisk me out to the car...After all, there was nothing but other little kids all over the place.  They assured and reassured me that the girl must have been mistaken.  I totally believed my parents and didn't really figure everything out for many years to come.  Once I did though, I was forever and always eagerly waiting for any chance I could get to sneak into the many hiding places Mom had for presents.  The excitement of it all was well worth the wait no matter who the delivery person was.

Lifetime Career Changes

They say we change our careers five to seven times in our lifetime.  I believe it.

My big plan in the early 1970's was to go to university and become a psychologist.  I loved listening to other people's problems and even wrote a Dear Abbey-like column for one school newspaper edition.  I loved to give advice and try to fix broken hearts or make things better in general.   You know what it's like to be on top of the world, finished highschool, bullet proof, knowing-it-all....but not having a clue that really, you know nothing.  I graduated from highschool - left the wide open spaces of the country and moved to the city.  Despite all the fantastic shopping and restaurants, I found myself in a small apartment on the 3rd floor of a building with no elevator.  There was a small balcony overlooking a couple of paved parking lots, but nothing much green.  There was the odd spindly tree barely surviving here and there, with a little Clark Gable fringe of a moustache lawn peeking through between the sidewalk cracks.  I was definitely in a concrete jungle but without the vines or foilage.  Imagine, as a farm kid, I had my own forest across the road and an open field at my back door.  Our farm yard had a long lane lined with evergreen trees that was in clear view of the house's  picture window.  The lane was one of the best parts of the whole yard because we flew up and down it and out onto the dirt road every single day on bikes, horses, or ski-doos and all the while smelling that beautiful, fresh, crisp country air. I had spent the summer that year working at the regional park and spent all my time outside painting, cleaning, picking up garbage, and taking tickets. I love the outdoors.

In the city, there was no room for my bike and I had no car, so I was grounded  unless I walked or took the bus.  The bus was okay except for the smell of  exhaust fumes that nearly finished me off.  I had a headache pretty well every days as a result.  I had never even been to Saskatoon before.  Buying groceries was probably the worst.  Juggling several full bags  of heavy things like canned goods and milk  got to be a drag.   Getting to the bus stop loaded down, waiting, riding the bus and walking from the bus stop to the apartment, then climbing three flights of stairs was murder.  The building had one temperature hot, hot, and hotter, so my room mate and I sweltered, especially in the winter.  That late Fall on Grey Cup Sunday, it was bitterly cold outside, but we were trying to cool off with our patio door opened a crack...well, maybe a little more than that.  What happened no one intended, but the water in the radiator pipe running under the window froze and burst.  Water flooded everywhere on our lovely red carpet. The flood was bad enough but the rich landlord's girlfriend came to investigate and she was pretty irate.  It was not a hallmark night.  Seems to me I was cooking chili in the apartment next door, drinking beer, smoking, and losing my sense of taste or something because every time I popped back into check and stir the chili, I thought it needed a little more chili powder.  If memory serves me, the chili was not the hit I thought it would be.

Classes in the College of Arts at university were in huge lecture theatres that housed two or three hundred students.  No one cared if you were there or not and they certainly didn't mark attendance.  In fact, they were hoping to weed you out that first year.  I began to find it easier to sleep through my morning classes and just attend the afternoon ones.  Taxis and hitch-hiking became a much preferred method of transport, but my pocket book began to suffer. My social life remained viable because a whole pile of friends from back home had also moved into the city to either work or go to school.  We had fun.  I passed that first year with low marks and one fail in French.  My Hudson Bay highschool French was no match for an all French class, i.e. no English allowed.  I still don't know what the required reading, "Le Petit Prince" was really about.  I remember giving a recap of the story to the prof, in French and him just shaking his head.  The only reason I took French was because I heard how boring the English class was.  Highschool in the early 1970's in rural Saskatchewan had no guidance counsellors...even if there had been though, I probably wouldn't have listened to any advice, because I knew it all.

As you can imagine, that first year of university was a disappointment for me. I learned to like the city by then, found the Biology museum and visited the Forestry Farm zoo and other interesting places like the Mendel Art Gallery often.  We took long walks along the river bank and walked across the bridges to downtown.  We got picked up by a cop once for jaywalking. We pled ignorance which was no defence, but it worked, because as we explained, where we came from everybody did it.  The riverbank was not as developed as it is today,  but the Broadway area was unique and the University, Broadway and Victoria bridges were as beautiful as they are today.  They held an ominous element though, because every so often somebody would jump off one and that would make everyone stand up and take notice that life wasn't always wonderful for everyone.  Two bars downtown were popular student hangouts - Jack's and Yip's.  The Sportsman Bar on 8th Street was another place we frequented.  For some reason, I drank my first and only zombie ever in that bar and wound up in the emergency ward because I was developing a kidney infection at the same time!  As you can imagine, I learned early on to curb my alcohol intake because I generally got violently ill.  Other than the social life, I didn't take to the university scene that first year, and by April, which was the end of it, I had searched my soul and that of my parents,  and we all opted for me to go to business college.  Mom and Dad were supportive, they just wanted me to find some way to support myself and I agreed.

I whizzed through a legal secretarial course and got honours.  I loved it and my first job was in a fairly big law office in Saskatoon.  We worked on real estate transactions, wills, criminal and divorce cases.  Overall, it was a good learning experience.  I had sewn several outfits to wear for my new career and I remember wearing a green polka dot skirt and top to my first interview where the male boss hired me on the spot.  Being naive, I attributed my good luck to my fledgling sewing abilites.  By a stroke of good luck the finished products had turned out really well.  (I still had not heard the wisecracks about 'sexetaries' and really didn't hear about them until a long while later). Those were the days of the miniskirt. The lawyer I was assigned to had a wonderful sense of humour and he went on to build a great reputation in his career.  He even became somewhat of a staple on the evening television news, at the very least a familiar face.  I  only stayed at that law office for about a year because I got engaged and was moving back home to be with my fiancee. and make plans for our wedding.  Right about that time, I was taken out for lunch by an old friend from home who was a lawyer in another Saskatoon office. He was someone that was older than me and was heavily involved in youth politics.  We went to some of the same events.  His mother knew my mother.   He was asking me if I would go to work for him, but I declined in favor of moving away to be with my boyfriend.  Think of how things might look today if my life had gone down that path!

Back in Hudson Bay, I boarded with some old family friends until the wedding, Alex and Beatrice.  She was a fabulous cook!  My soon-to-be husband was renting a house with a couple of friends.  We would buy that house for $9,000.00, if you can imagine it.  Thank goodness my dad was a generous man and could loan us the money.  We were able to pay him back when we sold it and doubled our money!  We were ecstatic...and it was 1975.  I found a job as a clerical person in a bank and that was fun too.  I knew everyone there and almost all the customers.  In that town, the people working in the forestry industry were making really big money and it was exciting to see them come in.  I was good at doing the secretarial work, but when it came to helping out with the banking stuff, I really should have kept to what I knew.  I got a kick out of watching the different people come in to access their safety deposit boxes.  I remember one elderly bachelor who had a real ritual with some numbers he had written down and was very secretive about everything.  I always wondered what he was up to, but of course that was strictly private and confidential.  I had gone from making about $300.00 per month in the law office to doubling it at the bank.  I was making over $600.00 per month!  All my bosses up to this point were males.

We got married and within a few months the entrepreneurial spirit hit so my husband and I bought a flower shop.  It was in the same town as my parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, and a whole pile of other relatives, so things were exciting.  While in the flower shop, I also worked a maternity leave position part-time for the legal aide office and that was superbly interesting.  The criminal cases and the messy divorces were the best.  I was surrounded by some of the best co-workers you could ever find.  We worked hard and laughed hard.  One of the young lawyers rented the suite above our flower shop so we got to know him quite well.   Although he eventually moved on and we did too, we were saddened to hear a few years later that he had drowned in his bathtub.  Unfortunately, he had a condition that caused seizures.  Rest in peace Gabe Burkhart.

It was never my intention to try to pretend that I had a flare for floral designing.  I didn't.  I knew nothing about it really.  My plan was to continue with my career as a legal secretary.  As it turned out, the workload in the flower shop was unbelievable and even though my job was to do books, I soon became the clerk, delivery person, flower picker upper, jack-of-all-trades and oh my goodness....floral designer.  Not often, but when we were absolutely swamped and desperate on certain days like Mother's Day or Valentines or Christmas, I would step in to help with designing.  I normally kept to  simple, low key things like corsages, wreaths, or sprays but soon I graduated to  casket pieces and arrangements.  It was ironic that me, the fake designer could put almost anythng into the display fridge on those days and have it bought up from under my nose by these frantic last minute shopping men who waited for the midnight hour to pick something up for their women.   It was fun, it was exhilarating and it was plenty of laughs.  For awhile we stocked these little fat kitchen witches and I loved them.  I was excitedly talking about them one day to a customer, saying, how did she get so fat with that little wee mouth?...and she suddenly said, "I'll take one!"  I started laughing, because of all things, I certainly never thought of myself as a high pressure salesperson, and it appeared that I had just been one!  In fact, I remember saying to her, "oh no, you don't have to", but it was too late, she wanted one.

During the five years we had the flower shop, I went through two pregnancies and gave birth to two babies.  Then we moved back to Hudson Bay for my husband to return to his former job, and I travelled back to Melfort for a week every month to do the flower shop books.  After a short time though, my husband became one of the casualties to a massive lay off at his workplace.  To make ends meet, I went to work full time at a government office for tourism and renewable resources.   That was my best job ever.  We were four women out of an entire staff of men.  Men are generally great to work with and far better than working with women.  Men never sit around complaining or whining about what's wrong like women do.  They either hang their heads and grumble or just laugh everything off.  They make fun of each other and call each other nicknames like bullet head or godzilla.  They treated all of us women like beauty queens whether we were or not. They were notorious flirts and took every opportunity to try to come onto any of us.  One guy admitted to me that he didn't care what the woman looked like because he could always put a paper bag over her head!  Turkey!  All in all, I have very fond memories of that place and those guys.  They were just what I needed.   I lost weight, I started to fit into clothes I hadn't worn in a couple of years.  I was married and they knew it.  I was loyal to my husband and they knew it, but that made it all the more  memorable. 

Next my husband got a call from a former co-worker to accept a job in Saskatoon, so off we moved.  I stayed home with the kids over the summer, but come Fall, 1983, I started looking for work and found it as a clerical person at a post-secondary institution.  I worked for several areas, facilities, the vice principal of programs, human resources and the bookstore.  I went part-time after about a year and then started taking night classes towards nursing.  By 1987, I enrolled in nursing full time and kept working part-time at the same facility.  We moved to Prince Albert in 1988 and I finished my training as a diploma nurse in 1989.  My kids were in elementary school by this time and we had bought a trampoline.  Super Channel was a new thing and computer games were really catching on.  Mario Bros. is one I can remember the kids playing.

I went to work casual for the Holy Family Hospital and for the Victorian Order of Nurses.  I worked on two floors - maternity and nursery, and medicine/palliative care.  I did a variety of things with the VON such as worked at the health centres at Weyerhaeuser and Woodland Campus. I also participated in mass immunizations at places like the Correctional Centre and the Fire Hall. Now suddenly, all my bosses were women. 

By 1990, the VON negotiated a contract with Woodland Campus to provide a health nurse, and I was it.  That job lasted eight years and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  By 1998, I left  for a year to perform a temporary nurse manager position at Herb Bassett Nursing Home.  When I returned, I became an instructor for the Home Care/Special Care Aide program. By 2004, I had obtained my Bachelor of Science in Nursing and moved to Melfort to take a management position at a nursing home there.  After two years, I was ready to move back to Saskatoon and be near my kids.  By this time, they were married and contemplating having babies of their own.  I took another management position for a year again in a nursing home and was enticed back to post-secondary education by an ad in the paper.

It is now five years since I began as program head for the Practical Nursing program.  We are wondering how to celebrate this landmark year.  A condition of the job was to obtain a master's degree and I did so in 2010.  That same year, just to be on the safe side, I also did the training to be a real estate agent, but that's for after I retire.  Retirement??  That won't be for at least eight years and probably more if the government gets its way!