Rural Roots

When the country verses the city discussion arises,I can speak with some experience on both lifestyles. In retrospect, growing up on a tobacco farm in rural Elgin County in the fifties and sixties wasn’t really as dull as I thought it was at the time.  I recall a neighbour who did crop dusting, and would on occasion fly at a very low altitude over our house, just because he could. "Oh, that’s Jerry". my Dad would say with amusement.

My mother didn’t drive, or more accurately, she didn’t have a driver’s license. Sometimes, when the need arose with my Dad being busy, she would load me into the car and we would drive to nearby Springfield for groceries. With the Ontario Police College just a few miles away, we would sometimes pass a cruiser and give a friendly wave to the officers who always smiled and waved back, unaware that my mother only had a beginner’s license. Almost everybody waves in the country.

As an only child, I welcomed spending time with the children across the road who happened to be Amish Mennonites. I would ride in the buggies with them and watch them make ice cream the old fashioned way.

There were 14 children in the family and half of them were adopted. Although they were prohibited from having telephones they would often use ours. More than once, we received calls on our party line from their relatives in Indiana, where they had lived before moving to Elgin County. “Could you tell Pete his cousin Abner passed away”? a voice would ask my mother in the dead of night. “It’s three in the morning here. I’ll tell him in the morning” would be her response. We bought their cleaned and plucked chickens and farm fresh eggs. In the summer we picked strawberries in their “pick your own” patch. One winter during an ice storm that closed the roads and brought down hydro lines, they brought over an iron stove of some sort that we could cook on. On a muddy March night their old Victorian home caught fire. The volunteer fire department tried to get water from our pond, but got stuck in the mud and it burned to the ground. The family then took up residence in the original homestead on our farm which was vacant at the time.

Years later, when they moved to the British Honduras to start an orphanage, they wrote to my mother telling her they had been held up at gunpoint in their home, and the potatoes had been stolen right out of their field. The family patriarch died while in Honduras, and the family eventually returned to Ontario.

We also had an Amish blacksmith on our corner, who would fix my Dad’s farm machinery as things became more mechanized. Today the Amish in the Aylmer area are said to have cellphones, but they still ride in horse and buggies and dress in the traditional garb. Making a living at cash crop farming has become a challenge and many have turned to furniture making, as their counterparts in Waterloo County have been doing for many years. Both my kitchen and dining room table and chairs are handmade by Elgin County Mennonites, and will no doubt outlast me. Mennonite baking, furniture and other articles can be bought at the Aylmer sales arena every Tuesday. http://www.aylmersalesarena.ca

My Dad, who began working at the age of 9 after coming to Canada from Belgium,is now 93. He still lives in his own home in Tillsonburg, where my parents eventually moved and I attended high school. My Mother,who passed away in 2011, eventually took driving lessons and acquired her driver's license. We still have friends and relatives in the Aylmer area, and sometimes turn down the now paved Walker side road, to take a look at the old neighbourhood.

Rapper Vanilla Ice may have a reality show dubbed “Vanilla Ice Goes Amish”, but I like to think,I did it first.