Longing for a Life Long-lost
Pining for the carefree, childhood days of life on the Prairies
Ican still, these many years on, recall with relish my summer mornings as a child. Waking up in my second-floor bedroom above the station platform and looking out over the pasture across the railway tracks to see which cars were coming down the highway. The large orange sun in the eastern sky lighting our kitchen as my father made us breakfast. The low sound of grasshoppers and crickets, punctuated by the joyful song of the meadowlark on the fence post that separated our yard from the wheat field next door. The sound of a screen door slamming in the village across the wheat field. The rumblings of a tractor carried on the breeze. The mournful call of the train as it approached, followed by a heightened tension and the maelstrom as it passed, followed by the reced- ing clatter, then silence. These are all memories of a childhood lived in a small Prairie town. Although I remember the years immediately preceding my brief four-year sojourn in this quiet farming village in southeastern Saskatchewan, and those that followed, they don’t possess the richness of the tapestry that was my life there as a young boy. It is these memories that I have buried in the deep recesses of my mind to be harvested when confronted by famines of spirit in my adult life.
My perspective as a child was generally not one of gladness or of appreciation for what surrounded me. Nor would I have ever considered the positive attributes of a life lived on the Prairie. I was the son of a railway station agent, an individual whose decision to remain in the West rather than return to his ancestral home in Nova Scotia was a source of consternation and frustration, especially in the winter when, for me, the Prairie became a frigid wasteland, with very little to compensate for my feeling of isolation.
In summer, I often had the chance to visit my grandparents in Nova Scotia and it was there, among my cousins, that my heart lay, and it was there that I longed to be.
When the cold days of autumn descended on our small village, and we braced for the inevitable onslaught of the coming Prairie winter, my young mind
was almost as bleak as the landscape that stretched for endless miles around us, broken only by the copses of scrub poplar and the ubiquitous windbreaks around the farmyards of our neighbours. But in summer, all that was forgotten and the joy of being outside with my friends and of enjoying the soft, warm touch of the Prairie wind made my world a paradise.
As a child, I could never have articulated my feelings, and it is only in retrospect that I can view my life there with any sense of gladness. What I have come to realize in the ensuing decades is that in those years when I spent my summers on the Prairie, I lived minute-to-minute and hour-to-hour. Time was not wasted. Every day was an adventure spent outdoors. I lived in the present and, with my friends, experienced many lives of the imagination, where we were pirates, pilots or movie stars. In the course of a summer, we could be anything or anyone that our imaginations could conjure. When we played baseball, we were not Fletcher, or Jimmy, or Jackie, we were Mickey Mantle. In football, we were either Saskatchewan Roughriders’ quarterback Ron Lancaster or his rival, Kenny Ploen of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Surrounded as we were by open, short-grass Prairie, our sky was large and our vistas sweeping. There was no feeling of being closed in. We looked to the horizon and, perhaps like many Prairie dwellers before us, dreamed of going beyond it, to explore the worlds past the edge of ours.
Perhaps it was the winters, and the attendant feelings of isolation when the cold kept us at bay and the skating rink became the centre of our focus, that motivated the feelings of restlessness in me. Perhaps it was the exposure to other places and landscapes that my journeys east to my grandparents engendered in me. The lush flora of those places was held in stark contrast to the dearth around me and blinded me to what was there.
Oh, to once more go to the rink on a cold, winter night and appreciate the warmth and joy of the unappreciated winters of my childhood; once more to explore the summer fields of my youth in that quiet, sustaining village, and to know the safety that this place represented. Oh, that this were possible! All that sustained me in those times is no more. My friends and playmates are gone. The doors of the skating rink wear rusty locks. Few children run wild through the now quiet streets. All is closed and gone and what remains are the elderly, dreaming and longing for young lives lived in this quiet place, where the winters were feared and the summers too short.
It is only now, several decades later, with a life long-lived and dreams realized and lost, with a world explored and found wanting, that I sometimes long to return to my village on the Prairie and rediscover the life that I had once been privileged to live there. ■