My standard line about farming is that, for whatever reason, I grew up more passionate about books than barley and more interested in computers than combines.
With that said, I feel very fortunate that I grew up in a rural community as part of a farming family.
I also managed to luck into getting the best of both worlds – our farm had been in our family since my great-great-grandparents settled it in 1883 but we lived in a house in town for most of my life.
This meant I got exposure to farm life and its advantages (everything from learning how to drive at a very early age to harvest suppers in the field to a more general understanding and appreciation of the natural world) but I also got to live in town and enjoy all of its advantages as well (being able to play with friends and participate in extracurricular activities in a way that was harder for my friends who lived on farms to do, having easy access to everything from grocery stores to pool halls to video rental stores.)
It’s a bit of cliche that rural life is rustic and idyllic but I think there’s some truth to that (or at least there was for me.) Spending the entire day outside playing with friends and only going home for supper; knowing all your neighbours; the strong sense of community and volunteer spirit.
Where we lived, I was able to walk out the back door and go right on to the town’s golf course, something you simply can’t do in the city (though my hometown’s golf course still had sand greens at the time but who’s complaining?) I lived one block from our high school so could sleep in late and still make final bell (Pace is following my example now as we live one block from his elementary school!)
I don’t know – I’m struggling a bit to write about how deeply I feel that rural upbringing influenced me (and wondering if it’s 100% the rural influence or was it also the time period or other factors? For example, does a kid growing up in Indian Head today have similar freedoms and experiences? Probably not.)
But speaking of freedoms, it wasn’t all perfect either – as I alluded to earlier, mine was but I know not everyone’s experience was idyllic. One of my classmates literally watched his dad shoot himself in the chest with a shotgun on Christmas Eve. And sometimes that freedom led to opportunities to do stupid things that kids in the city (with a greater police presence or just a presence of adults generally) might not do.
There’s one specific thing we did, usually under the influence of alcohol, that years later, led to the death of one young woman when her and her friends did the same thing and I think that it’s as much luck as anything else that I didn’t die from drunk driving or drunk roof riding or drunk elevator climbing or drunk gopher hunting. (Notice a theme?)
But again, this blog series isn’t supposed to be what made me good or made me perfect – it’s the mixture of good, bad and random that made me who I am.
And growing up in rural Saskatchewan is a huge part of who I am, even having now lived in cities for the majority of my life. But nothing will change how formative those first seventeen years of my life in a small town truly were.
