In summer 1955, still reeling from our mother's death from cancer six months earlier, my two older brothers, Robert and James, and I were shipped off to the Winnipeg, Manitoba area to stay for a month each with our mother's brother Etheridge and her sister Alice. Our father orchestrated this arrangement to allow time and space to court an interesting co-worker at the Minneapolis Health Department, a woman physician in her forties named Dr. Evelyn Hartman, who had never been married. Upon our return home, to our dismay, the flow of events had already become a torrent and their engagement was on. Despite our misgivings, she became our stepmother in September 1955 and remained so for another 45 years, another story completely.

Our unusual summer vacation in 1955 took on an aura of adventure to us, promising to be a good way to take our minds off our new and difficult life without our mother. Our first stop was an idyllic but dirt poor farm outside Winnipeg owned by Uncle Etheridge and his kind but always-harried wife Adelene. They raised cows for their milk and chickens for their eggs, and allowed a few acres of rolling fields to grow wild, occasionally harvesting hay. We had never lived on any type of farm before and our only contact with them had been our two earlier brief visits there, and our infrequent trips to the much smaller farm owned by Grandpa Park in Fair Ground, Ontario. Uncle Etheridge's place was at least familiar to us and we felt vaguely acquainted with our cousins Bruce and Barbara.

Due to space constraints I had a bed with Bruce who was hard to sleep with due to frequent thrashing, kicking and stealing of the covers, possibly mostly on my part. I remember getting him in trouble once by complaining to Uncle Etheridge, which led to a brief punishment for Bruce, something I had not expected and felt bad about bringing on. I spent much of my time hanging out with Barbara who seemed the closest in age and demeanor to me--two or three years younger. We would get into games together involving, for example, the rickety 1930s pickup truck that we once were pretending to drive. When we accidentally knocked the gearshift out of place, the truck started rolling backward down the driveway. We both jumped out as the unmanned truck gained speed and finally came to rest about 30 feet down the little hill by the house, still basically on the driveway, luckily without hitting anything. Uncle Etheridge was mad about it and told us never to mess with the gearshift again (but his manner was more reserved than many people's in delivering the message).

The farm was home to at least 30 dairy cows, and this produced, aside from milk, large quantities of cow dung everywhere, which I found disgusting and fascinating. Uncle Etheridge fairly often had to collect all this poop on a flatbed trailer to dispose of it, which led to another play opportunity for Barbara and me. What kid could resist climbing up a huge mountain of (mostly) dry cow dung, standing king of the mountain ten feet up in the air? Then there were the chickens, who I'd had very little direct contact with before: intriguing animals, but scary because they would peck at you suddenly if you bothered them. They all lived at the time in a large home-made chicken coop with walls made of hay bales, and translucent plastic sheeting for a ceiling. The flock was being plagued at the time with some sort of chicken disease (leg scales?), which caused some decimation of the population. I remember standing in the coop watching while a chicken right near me drooped its head, began to wobble and after a few seconds of dizzy wavering actually keeled over. I told Uncle Etheridge, and he got angry about it, obviously not wanting his chickens to be dying off. He grabbed the dead hen and another nearby already sprawling with its head back, and tossed them by their feet into the adjacent swamp. "Can't we eat them anymore?" I asked. "No, they're too sick for the meat to be good for us." A good point I hadn't thought of.

One bright day we all rode over to another farm nearby with the tractor towing a flat-bed trailer (probably the same one used for the dung) to collect about 40 bales of hay that Etheridge had earned in exchange for earlier cutting and baling the hay for the owners of the field. My brothers Robert, James, cousin Bruce and Uncle Etheridge all spent quite a bit of time loading the bales in careful piles on the trailer, with Barbara and I interested but ineffectual helpers. Once the shaggy mountain was completed, we all ascended the bales, and set off down the road back home. In moments it became joyously obvious that we were now on the hayride from heaven. Perched high in the air, cruising lazily at tractor speed, we all soaked in the sunlit meadows, patches of forest and the profusion of tall weeds and brilliant wildflowers that lined the dirt path, thrusting their way at us. The fragrances were varied and overwhelming. Those five miles must have been the prettiest in Manitoba. But just as we turned into the narrow dirt driveway of our farm something popped and all heads turned toward the trailer's back right tire, which had begun hissing air like a leaky party balloon. Etheridge dismounted the tractor to see what the problem was, and if he had allowed himself to swear, we would have learned a lot of new words right then. That side of the driveway fell away rather sharply into a ditch, and the wagon was already perched on the threshold, leaning awkwardly. Soon the pile of hay bales started to list to the right, and Etheridge called for all to abandon ship. Ever so slowly the hay bales one after another started to tumble off the trailer into a much less organized pile in the ditch. My memory may not be all that reliable, but I recall that the older boys did jump off as they were told, while Barbara and I, given so little time to react, opted to ride the bales down to the ground in an ecstasy of free flight. It wasn't all that far and I felt no danger; sure enough the landing in the hay was surprisingly soft. Uncle Etheridge scolded us after we had safely picked ourselves up off the fallen bales. By that time, only a dozen of them remained on the trailer bed itself. It was an unexpected moment of pure joy for me, that floating through the air from up high, and, if I had disobeyed a minor command, so what? It was worth it for that thrilling ride down. Likely, there soon followed a colossal effort to fix the tire and reload the bales, but we carefree youngest ones happily ignored it all and went in search of more adventure elsewhere.

Baths were possible at the farm but not that easy since there was no running hot water upstairs where the tub was. Water had to be heated and hauled up by the bucket, not much fun for Etheridge and the others who were somewhat stronger. I was too weak and small at the time to do any bucket hauling, which was fine with me. Another vivid memory about the bathroom upstairs was the slop pot. The bathtub had a drain for the bathwater, but the 'toilet' was actually a thick thirty-inch-tall tall pail with a toilet seat on it. I had never had to put up with anything like this back in Minneapolis (the closest thing was Grandpa Park's outhouse at his farm), so using it was offensive, disgusting and yucky for me, but necessary. It was worse by far for Uncle Etheridge who needed to wrestle that smelly, really heavy, sometimes overfilled bucket out of the bathroom, maneuver carefully it down the stairs, prod it out the door and struggle it into the woods somewhere. I wouldn't be surprised if it weighed nearly eighty pounds sometimes with so may people contributing to it so often. More than once during that process I heard some sloshing and yelling from the stairs, and I was careful to go nowhere near there at those times.

Naturally, hanging around all the cow poop in the hot summer weather made it necessary for us to pay frequent visits to the nearby swimming hole to get somewhat washed off, about a mile away by car, and populated by about 100 people every time we went. The oblong swimming hole was about 30 yards long, and the area always seemed crowded with people of all ages. Many adults ringed the shore, watching, while in the water a heavy majority of children paddled and splashed with abandon. One time Barbara wanted to show us all how she could now actually do some swimming. For thirty seconds she thrashed wildly with her arms and legs, with her head held high, eyes shut tight, raising an amazing amount of water into the air. When she finally stopped, forward progress in the water was no more than ten inches. Her face fell when she noticed how little success all that thrashing had produced. Luckily, her mom was nearby to give her some reassurance, but all of us boys thought it was really funny. When I tried to show how I could swim I couldn't do all that much better, having never practiced that summer at all. I had to keep my eyes closed too. The older boys, led by my brothers, would take advantage of this by sneakily moving down the waist-deep water to a place eight or ten feet away so that when I stopped to see how far I'd moved, using them as a reference point, it would appear that I had gotten nowhere at all. It took me three times to figure out their trick.

Near the end of our month on the farm, my uncle needed to visit a nearby grain elevator for a few minutes on some business matter, and invited along for the ride anyone who wanted to come. Barbara and I were the only takers. After a short drive down another dusty road we arrived at a tall weathered building beside some railroad tracks, the only structure for a least a mile in any direction. We had brought a little blue rubber ball with us, which we bounced to each other as we waited along the tracks for the oldsters to finish their discussion. Before long the ball took a bad bounce and went straight in the grain loading bin in the side of the elevator. The worker there watched it sail in and noted our long faces. "I can get it out," he reassured us. To our amazement, some mechanical sifting equipment clanked to life and almost immediately our ball came bounding out of a chute about ten feet off the ground--followed by a alarmed flying rat, who landed on the gravel and disappeared into the weeds in a second. Wow, was that exciting. Then, back to business as usual for all of us: a few more throws of the ball, some klutzy misses by Barbara and once again the errant ball sailed into the bin. The noisy grain sifter was begrudgingly put into operation another time, and within a few seconds our blue ball happily reappeared, followed by yet another enormous rat. Uncle Etheridge and the elevator man exchanged looks of resigned distaste. This rodent struck the ground head first and must have been knocked coo-coo, as we said then, because his legs wouldn't work right and he careened in several directions like a drunken sailor -- an obvious candidate for being put out of his misery. I am not proud to report that some primordial chase instinct suddenly awoke in me, and I chased him down like a predator, cornered him by the tracks, and with typical 9-year-old brainless bravado pounced on him with both feet. "He's a goner now!" I crowed. And he was. This enabled Barbara and I to make a closer inspection, and relish our state of being thrillingly, gleefully disgusted.
"Don't touch him!" my uncle yelled from down the tracks.
"But--he'd dead."
"That doesn't mean he isn't still covered with germs!"
It quickly dawned on me that he had another good point. My uncle was everlastingly patient with me in spite of my unpredictable behavior and trying practices.

Many little tidbits of memory remain with me from that time on the Manitoba farm: the little bedroom window without counterweights (I had never seen one like it before) that slammed down on my fingers twice in the first week; the task (entrusted to adults only) of closely examining fresh eggs in the light of the lamp to determine which had blood inside and thus could only be used to feed raw to the puppies; listening to the radio at night and discovering that we could hear our home radio station WCCO all the way from Minneapolis; climbing dangerously high trees where we could see out across the meadows for miles; the look of mild relief on my aunt and uncle's faces when the news came over the radio that the buying price for eggs had gone up a cent a dozen; playing in the ancient wrecked car off in the field near the chicken coop; watching the thermometer on the outside of the house drop by twenty degrees as a summer storm blew in; the sensation of having a week-old calf suck on my whole hand; and the time that the two mindless collies that lived there chased a car too far down the road and never came back, leaving us only the hyper puppies that lived under the porch.

In the month of August, 1955, we three boys moved again, with all our belongings, to North Kildonan, a sort of suburb of Winnipeg about a two hour's drive from Oak Bank, to stay with Aunt Alice, Uncle Bert and three of their four children. It was a much more normal house than Etheridge's, with indoor plumbing and neighboring houses that could be seen out the window. It was a modest home on a quiet street with a lot of trees and wild areas nearby, with an exciting addition inside, an actual television set! Outside, a sedate little creek trickled by the back yard, separated by a wood fence that enclosed the property. This fence was ostensibly the reason we were invited to stay there: we were to be the fence painting crew, thereby earning our keep. But luckily for me, after about an hour of attempted painting, it was determined that I was not to be trusted with a paintbrush, and so I was relieved of duty. I was okay with that. I have to admit I may have tried to encourage that outcome by the way I handled my brush. After all, I knew adults and was acquainted with some basic methods to employ to avoid work. Thus I was able to hang out with my cousins Doris, Paul and Hector, all about my age or younger, without having to perform many troublesome tasks. Judith, the oldest, had been shipped off to grandmother's to allow room for us visitors. Only brothers Robert and James were old enough to wield paint brushes and over the course of the next four weeks they did in fact paint the whole fence. The rest of us went through a lot of bonding and carefree spontaneous activity such as climbing a ladder into the tree in the yard, against the rules. Apparently the ladder had been placed there to enable some tree trimming or something. When my Aunt Alice spotted me on the tree branch, she exasperatedly lugged me bodily down the ladder, assuming that I was too scared to descend on my own, warning me never to get up there again. But when she caught me up in the tree again after half an hour, she waved her arms and refused to go after me again. I found my own way down without any trouble.

I remember going along with my three cousins on long walks through the neighborhood, including the scrub brush, where I first learned about nettles, the woodsy paths and the neighbor's huge vegetable garden a block away. This garden was really a field of vegetables and it seemed to lie on the most direct route to some of the best places to visit the cousins knew about. We walked as group through there about three times without incident, but wouldn't you know it, the one time I took that route through the garden by myself, the fat and grouchy housewife came out to yell at me for going through her property. I was very surprised because I thought it was an acceptable thing to do, since the locals had all waltzed through there without batting an eye. I tried to explain that to her and apologize but she was not satisfied. She ranted a while (possibly some other neighbor kids had damaged a few tomato plants once) and finally demanded, "Where is your mother?!"
This was not the right thing to ask me, and it must have been very dramatic to witness my theatrical and genuine crumbling into tears before her, finally admitting, "I don't have a mother." This stirred some compassion from her and a lowering of her voice.

"I'm sorry. Well, who's taking care of you then?"
"My aunt, in the next block," I managed to say. It was decided that Aunt Alice would stop by later to talk with her. When I explained all this to her, she was on my side, and a little miffed that the lady cared about this issue at all. But Alice paid her a visit later (without kids) and everything was congenial between them. The upshot of the incident was that none of the kids in the house were allowed to go through that field any more, but would be required to go around it on actual roads and public land to their destinations. I don't know how long afterwards this prohibition actually lasted.

Another day, Paul and Hector wanted to walk over a few blocks to the local factory building where the noon whistle was about to go off. I thought this didn't sound all that exciting, but Doris joined in and said, "Come on, it's really loud!" So we all strolled over there and stood in the field grass about 20 yards from the front of a one-story cement building, on the top of which I could see the large horn aimed our way. It was not all that big a place, but the noon whistle gave it an undeniable dominance. Apparently people in the neighborhood had come to rely on that noon horn to keep track of the passages of the day. In front of the main door was a parking lot and a serious-looking middle-aged businessman was walking back to his car. With some friendly curiosity he looked at us kids hanging out there, and must have wondered why we wanted just to stand there looking at him. Suddenly the horn went off and it was indeed the loudest thing I had heard in a long time. It was ear-splitting. The man we were watching was not ready for it at all and just about jumped out of his suit, or skin, or both. He could have been a foot off the ground for a second. We all started to laugh hysterically and after a moment of recovery he started to laugh too, no doubt realizing that he must have looked awfully silly. So the visit to hear the noon horn blow turned out to be pretty entertaining after all, and I'm really glad they took me along.

I remember once Alice standing in the kitchen looking oddly at the milkman as he came to the door for his daily delivery. He noticed it too and asked with a smile what was up. "Oh, you lucky, lucky milkman!" she chuckled. She asked how much extra milk he had on the truck and when he said "plenty" she asked him to bring in about six extra quarts (all his milk was in quart bottles at that time). It seems that with the addition of three ravenous boys in the house, we were now collectively going through about three quarts of whole milk per meal.

Another day I witnessed an incident at the house that made me feel somewhat proud of how well informed and intelligent Aunt Alice was. It was the occasion of the installation of a new water heater in the house. She got into a discussion with a plumber's assistant, a guy in his mid twenties, apparently not very well versed in the science of water heaters yet. The master plumber hadn't arrived and, after a question from Alice about the air intake on the new heater, the assistant claimed that there was no need for air to get into the tank. Alice insisted, "Well, air has got to get in there if the water's going to come out," but the young guy wouldn't believe her. Later, when the master plumber arrived and the assistant was getting something from the truck, Alice told the plumber, "Your assistant doesn't think there's any need for air to get into the tank."

He looked surprised and shook his head. "You've got to let air get in or else it won't work right." They had a private chuckle together at the expense of the assistant, who through his boss was soon to become more enlightened. How would she know about stuff like that, I wondered at the time. She was always surprising me with information about something.

One really funny incident sticks out in my mind from my visit during that August, and it involves Uncle Bert, a congenial guy who always treated us kindly. Toward the end of the day one day, Bert charged in the back door behaving quite excitedly. "Has the TV news come on yet?" No, but it's just about time. "I'm going to be on the news today!" Soon we were all gathered in front of the TV for the local news broadcast. It turned out that during the day several members of various media were invited out onto Lake Winnipeg on a 60-foot boat for a news story of some kind. Lake Winnipeg is about half the size of Lake Michigan, huge. Bert was a producer for the fledgling CBC television network and several other news people and a film crew were on the boat with him. The yacht went out nearly to the middle of the lake, I gather, and it was a fairly windy day, which brought up the swells in the water dramatically. The TV film crew's announcer talked a little about why they were all there (possibly something about the fishing industry or maybe a ship that sank, for all I remember), and soon they started talking about how many of the folks on the boat were getting seasick. This was followed by at least five seconds of a close-up of Bert, looking quite green (even though it was a black and white TV), but displaying his typical winsome little smile as if to convey that he could roll with anything here. The story went through the meat of the presentation, whatever it was about, and finally finished up with a return to the seasickness thread, complete with another shot of Bert and a couple of others hunched over and clinging to the side of the boat. We all knew it was Bert because of his coat, but his head was over the railing, no longer visible. No secret here as to what was happening. This constituted Bert's big appearance on the local news, complete with his identification, and he laughed about it good-naturedly even if he was a little embarrassed. I noticed that he had not said. "I'm going to be on the news today, getting humiliated." Other people would probably have kept quiet about it all together.

1955 has always remained a pivotal, watershed year for me. We returned home to Minneapolis after our completely untypical summer to an entirely new life. Within a month there was a wedding to attend--where Dad was the groom! Then followed the awkward and troubling era of living in the same house with a woman who was opposite of our mother in nearly every way. We drifted away from our Canadian cousins after having gone through so much with them; with our mother gone, sadly, the impetus to stay in contact was missing. Only just recently did I become happily reconnected with many of these cousins, and three others living in Ottawa. Individualistic children become interesting adults. Bruce is now a well-respected corporate insolvency attorney in Toronto; Barbara, also in Toronto, is a psychotherapist; Judith, in Three Rivers, Quebec, is a published writer of prose, especially short stories, in both English and French, and a translator of poetry from French into English; Doris works at home near the north shore of Lake Ontario, where she's a free-lance editor of other people's prose, Paul lives in Montreal where he translates reams of government documents from English into French; and Hector, recently the Canadian ambassador to Kazakhstan, is now the Canada’s Counsel General in St. Petersburg, Russia.