SIDNEY, Man. – Dylan Carritt seems indifferent to the mosquitoes that dart around him in the humid warmth of the evening.
After clambering up the knots of a rope swing, he eagerly looks for someone to set the swing in motion.
“Dad, can you push me? Can you push me?” he calls to his father, who is seated at a nearby picnic table.
Dylan waits for his father to give him a gentle push.
Seeing that his father hasn’t budged, the eight-year-old boy repeats his appeal.
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“Dad, can you push me?”
Ken Carritt soon relents, setting the swing in motion. Dylan’s soft blue eyes light up as he swings back and forth like the pendulum of a clock.
The scene has been played out many times before, says his mother, Brenda.
“He’d go around on that swing all day if there was someone there pushing him.”
The Carritts grow potatoes and feed cattle south of Sidney, a small community in southwestern Manitoba.
Already emerged, the potato plants look healthy, but potato beetles have also appeared. Time will tell whether spraying is needed to combat the insect menace.
And there are days when trucks arrive around the clock to haul part of last year’s potato harvest to a nearby processing plant. Ken and Brenda share in the task of sorting and grading potatoes being conveyed onto the trucks.
The cattle, released to forage on lush pastures, still need to be checked. With a 95-head cow/calf operation and a small feedlot, work is never in short supply.
“It still goes on,” says Ken, during a brief respite in the ebb and flow of work on his family’s farm.
The farm and small town life produce few diversions and attractions familiar to city dwellers.
But Ken and Brenda cherish the country lifestyle, a reverence that stemmed from their own childhoods on area farms.
They chose farming so they could give their children the same experiences.
“I worked for quite a while in the oil fields,” Ken says. “That’s no life compared to this. I’m here every night and that’s very important with a family.”
Dylan has a sister, Leah, and two brothers, Odell and Adam. The four siblings share a bond that was woven from their rural roots. Despite the slight difference in ages, they each have an interest in sports, music, gardening and animals.
Leah, 14, keeps a hamster in her room. Odell, 12, has an iguana, housed in an upright shower stall. Almost neon green in color, the iguana occasionally escapes, finding the household plants a good source of camouflage.
A short stroll from the house, there are horses in a corral and baby chicks in a shed where they’re kept warm with a heat lamp.
There used to be rabbits.
“We don’t know where they are,” says Leah, noting the two bunnies devised a disappearing act of their own.
“The one got pregnant and she ran away.”
Odell used to care for the baby chicks, one of his first entrepreneurial pursuits on the farm. He leads the way to two wooden feeders that he built to make the chores more efficient.
He now has a steer calf. He hopes this fall to trade the steer for a heifer, possibly forming the foundation for a future herd.
Adam, 10, has inherited his older brother’s poultry venture. He invested in 50 chicks this spring, bankrolled by money from his parents. When he sells the poultry, he will repay the loan from his parents, bank some money to buy more chicks next year, and possibly have enough left over for spending.
Between chores, school, sports and music lessons, the four children find time for adventures not unlike those of Huck Finn lore.
Winter snowdrifts in a nearby pasture are ideal for tobogganing. The annual spring thaw creates a pond of water to carry homemade rafts.
“We call it Death Lake, because it’s so cold and deep,” says Odell. “We have some good times in the water.”
During the summer months, a towering field of sorghum becomes the perfect place for youngsters to blaze trails through imaginary jungles. A playground, horses, motorbikes and a canoe add to the summer’s menu of activities.
The children also share a clubhouse, a remnant of their parents’ former trailer home. Leah sponged the interior with stencils of stars and moons to lend it some charm.
The children like the sense of freedom that comes from living on an expanse of prairie farmland. The animals are important to them, too, especially the horses.
“We have lots of animals,” says Leah. “If we lived in town, we wouldn’t have horses or anything.”
Although their lives are rooted in the farm soils near Sidney, the Carritt children already have varied views of what they want to become when they grow up.
Leah would like to become a lawyer or psychiatrist. Odell wants to start a construction company and perhaps farm when he grows up. Adam is thinking about becoming an architect or engineer.
Dylan reveals that he wants to be “an army man.” Or maybe a policeman. “No,” he finally concludes, “I’m going to take over the farm.”
