Last week, I made the long trip back to Saskatchewan, Canada, where I visited my Mom who's in a nursing home there, my brother, his wife and my neice. It has been nearly 50 years since I lived there, but something about just breathing the air takes me back to my childhood, and I am reminded that in my family, we didn’t tell stories, but we did sing. And there were times in January when word of an upcoming dance cracked the hard glass of winter in our little community. It was a “do-it-ourselves” event. Someone would wake up the furnace in a hibernating hall, and sprinkle green wax across its pale wooden floor, and someone else brought immigrant fiddles out of the closet and grandpa’s guitar from under the bed, and our Moms and Grandma’s baked bread, pies and chocolate cake.
In the crisp twilight of a Saturday night, everyone got there however they could. Some came in dust-creaky cars with their windows wide open to dilute fumes pouring from exhausted mufflers; some came in horse-snorting sleighs called ‘cutters’ that sailed between fence posts on a carpet of snowdrifts; and we felt the magic of being quilt-bundled kids perched high on a John Deere tractor fender, feeling big rubber burn a pathway through a Milky Way wilderness.
It was freezing cold, but worth it, to have a chance to smile at each other across a lantern-lit room, breathing sweet dust stirred up into sweet-shuffle dreams of romance lost and found, in a schottische, a two-step, a square dance or two, called out to a choir of swish-sliding shoes.
By ten, they’d be sprawled out tired, politely waiting on straight wooden benches around the wall, while young girls like me, with shy glances and shining hair, waltzed platters of white bread sandwiches all around the room, offering up the mashed up egg? the bologna with butter? the ham of the devil? And then we’d slide giggling back to the kitchen to lead a procession of porcelain mugs, followed by men hoisting blue spotted pots of smoky boiled coffee, calloused hands gripping hot wire handles with greasy potholders. They threw back their heads and laughed.
Later, while they were all rising an eye-blinding polka, we’d sneak out back to catch glimpses of teenagers drinking in cars, and to stand silently breathing in miles of uncountable stars. Then, we all laughed at once and ran shivering back to join in the singing of one last waltz, “Good Night, Sweetheart, Good Night.”
In the crisp twilight of a Saturday night, everyone got there however they could. Some came in dust-creaky cars with their windows wide open to dilute fumes pouring from exhausted mufflers; some came in horse-snorting sleighs called ‘cutters’ that sailed between fence posts on a carpet of snowdrifts; and we felt the magic of being quilt-bundled kids perched high on a John Deere tractor fender, feeling big rubber burn a pathway through a Milky Way wilderness.
It was freezing cold, but worth it, to have a chance to smile at each other across a lantern-lit room, breathing sweet dust stirred up into sweet-shuffle dreams of romance lost and found, in a schottische, a two-step, a square dance or two, called out to a choir of swish-sliding shoes.
By ten, they’d be sprawled out tired, politely waiting on straight wooden benches around the wall, while young girls like me, with shy glances and shining hair, waltzed platters of white bread sandwiches all around the room, offering up the mashed up egg? the bologna with butter? the ham of the devil? And then we’d slide giggling back to the kitchen to lead a procession of porcelain mugs, followed by men hoisting blue spotted pots of smoky boiled coffee, calloused hands gripping hot wire handles with greasy potholders. They threw back their heads and laughed.
Later, while they were all rising an eye-blinding polka, we’d sneak out back to catch glimpses of teenagers drinking in cars, and to stand silently breathing in miles of uncountable stars. Then, we all laughed at once and ran shivering back to join in the singing of one last waltz, “Good Night, Sweetheart, Good Night.”
