I grew up in a small town, but even in small towns there can be a disconnect between town and country.
My aunt Joyce Horn and her husband, Vern, did their best to make sure we knew why the country mattered. We spent part of every summer vacation at their farm just outside Shaunavon.
Last week, Joyce died. I couldn’t fall asleep the night we got the news, my busy brain churning up memories of all the things I learned from her. Things like:
The value of hard work. We fed chickens, gathered eggs, assembled milk separators, baked bread, pressed buttermilk out of freshly churned butter, hung laundry, picked berries, mowed lawns, tilled potato patches. It was hard work. But it was fun and meaningful work.
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Fresh bread tastes better than anything you could order at a restaurant. We had home-canned pickles and spiced applesauce laced with dense, fresh cream, thickly sliced bacon, and eggs gathered that morning, fried chicken, and potatoes just dug from the garden. All of it unbelievably good. All of it produced on the farm.
You won’t know if you can do something until you try. I could drive a garden tractor by the time I was eight or nine. The grain truck, on the other hand, proved beyond my abilities. I pleaded to drive it to the field one day, trying to see over the dashboard while keeping my feet near the pedals. I never made it out of first gear and stalled once. I also learned not to slide down round bales, because you are likely to bruise your tailbone, and I learned that pigs move faster than you might think.
Family matters. Aunt Joyce was at some of the biggest moments of my life – school plays and concerts, high school graduation, my wedding. My best friend’s funeral. She kept photos of my kids on her fridge, next to dozens of other family photos.
Give everyone you meet a smile. Aunt Joyce had lupus, and even when she was really suffering with it, she still met me every time with a smile and asked how we were all doing. And she always waited for the answer.
Life is a circle. We tended newly hatched chicks and fed them as they grew. I cried when it came time to butcher them and I always wondered why she let us watch this brutal part of farming. Now I understand she was showing us that death was a necessary part of life.
Big lessons, these. We absorbed them unwittingly but unerringly with every visit to the farm, every conversation we had, every task we were assigned. Each of us who has known Joyce has learned something from her and will carry a part of her in our hearts. As long as she is there, she is never really gone.
