Summer vacation was never long enough
School vacation during my boyhood was never long enough, or so it seemed, and soon haying time would roll around.
Both boys and girls enjoyed making hay, especially riding on top of an ox team wagon loaded with dry hay. As we enjoyed the “healthy” rays of the warm summer sun and inhaled the fresh unpolluted air of the late 1940s and early 50s, we did not realize how fast the world was changing. We did not know that a thing called progress would reduce the two-acre farm to a mere piece of history or for some, hobby farming.
Since my grandfather did not have a team of oxen of his own, my uncle Ti-Boise would come with his faithful team “Bill and Bright” to do the mowing. This time, instead of the horse hoe or spring tooth harrow used for planting, the farm implements were the mowing machine, hay raker and hay wagon. One person was required to sit on the hay mower to work the controls while the teamer controlled the team. My grandfather usually sat on the mower for the first cut and then one of us boys would have the honour. Those who did not sit on the mower watched as the white-faced team of oxen performed at their best.
But making hay with my grandfather and getting paid in molasses cookies and “donut holes” did not put bread on the table as they used to say. My brother Remi, friend Clifford M. and I would get hired to make hay with a local dairy farmer named Andre who had seven cows. This paid 25 cents per hour; it enabled us to buy a few school supplies and see John Wayne movies, like “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “Rio Grande” at our parish hall.
Also a big event every summer at the parish hall was when Vic Mullen came with his musician and country music show. Charging 25 cents at the door did not make Mullen a rich man, but it was a wonderful entertainment evening in those days before television.
About this time we would see the American tourists, people born in our village but living in the States, with their fancy automobiles. There were big Desotos, Packards, Studebakers, Hudsons and other classy cars that we only saw in summertime.
We also went into the junk business, saving empty beer bottles and old metal items brought a few extra dollars. Especially when people started getting rid of the lead pipes under their sink. Lead paid well and when someone tore a chimney down we saved or salvaged the lead flashings. Gathering Irish moss was also a money maker during those summers of long ago. We gathered moss at low tide and hauled it home in a two-wheel cart we had, then it was dried, packaged in burlap bags and sold to the local moss buyer.
In our “Anything for a buck business” we became eel fishermen and sold our product door to door. Our friend Clifford M. was an “inside man” at D’ Entremont Fisheries Ltd., which meant we could get all the free herring bait needed to lure eels inside our homemade traps. His family also had a long double-ender fishing dory named the “Red Sack” which we used for our fishing enterprise. During hurricane Edna the beach was broken and with high tides churning the bottom, the eels had tried to make it to safety over the shoreline only to be stuck high and dry on the grassy salt-water marsh when the tide went down. The bigger fish, about two inches in diameter and greyish green in colour, were too tired to put up much of a fight. Someone went to get large burlap feed bag and we filled the whole bag and it took the three of us to haul it home. It consumed most of the morning just to clean out our catch. What we could not sell door to door we ate at home; eel soup, eel pie, fried eels, baked eels, broiled eels and someone even suggested that we should make hamburgers with the rest.
And that’s how we spent our summer vacation, many, many years ago when the pace was relaxed, a simple world of apple pie and fried chicken with cranberry sauce every Sunday…but best of all we were young in years and in spirit.