Remembering......Aunt Kate

There are too many memories – they make me feel lonely.” Kate Fisher, around 1980.

I understand what she meant now because they make me lonely too. The memories that rattle around in my brain are sometimes simple and untold. Of course, everyone has memories that are theirs alone – and some people think that everyone should know their particular memories. Some people have very different memories of the same event – that is true of every significant event in our family's history, largely because while one person remembers the event as a twelve year old, someone else would've been six!

In Dauphin last weekend, my bro-in-law, my sister and I drove around the countryside immediately West of the homestead where our grandfather, our father and his sisters, our generation and a now a third generation lives.

I remembered bringing the alfalfa hay to the yard from the hayfield on the most Western part of the home half section.

I remember age 2 or 3. running around the moving but empty hayrack until our father turned and told us to sit down. One particular ordinary day of bringing in the hay, I sat high behind our father – alone, I don't recall anyone else in the “nest” that he had made for me, a pocket in the top of the hay. I could see over my father's head because he was sitting with his legs hooked over the front of the rack. Lying on my stomach rocking along on top of the hay, I watched the horses plod along; on the left was the dark brown King, with his blind right eye inwards towards Queen. She was red-brown with a red-brown-coloured mane and tail. They flicked their ears back in forth and their necks swayed back and forth in unison with one another and with their buttocks. They hardly ever turned their heads away from straight ahead. They wore “blinders” on the sides of their bridles.

The reins were loosely held in Dad's hands. There was a line of trees across the field North to South, willows and berry trees mostly to the South and a small bluff of mixed trees at the North. There was a small dry creekbed across the road where Dad slowed the horses and reminded me to sit down. After the dip, the road was hard-packed dirt when it was dry. Sometimes, if it wasn't too hot, he would ask the horses to trot and their harness would clink while the hayrack creaked.

But the trees aren't there anymore, the horses died long ago and I can't remember when Dad started pulling the hay rack with a tractor. No one else shares that memory.

Dad used horses for hauling hay long after he was doing other farm work with a tractor. He could get off the hayrack, pick up a hay-fork, put hay onto the rack and then ask the horses to move forward with a cluck and stop again with a “whoa”. A tractor needed a person!