The Bones Know

She could feel it in her bones. Something was wrong. She chose to ignore it, avoidance was more palatable than acknowledging.

“Always trust the bones,” Grandma Ferris used to say, but then she believed in fairies and the power of the rowan tree. Old wives tales from the old days.

She pushed the niggling fear to the back of her mind and got on with life.

“What’s that?” her husband said one night; they were in bed.

“Nothing,” she replied. But she knew it wasn’t “nothing.” It was something.

She knew it was cancer before the doctor told her.

#99WordStories #HighamFamilyHistory #BreastCancer #Bones #RadiationTreatment #MargaretGHanna #PrairieHistory #CreativeNonFiction

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Backstory:

Mary Higham, my maternal grandmother, was diagnosed with breast cancer about 1949 and underwent radiation treatment. I don’t know if she had a mastectomy, and those who might have known are no longer alive to tell. The cancer must have gone into remission because she lived another six years, but in either late 1954 or early 1955 it roared back. More radiation treatment followed. Two of my uncles remember seeing nasty radiation burns on her neck which suggests it had mestastasized. She died September 29, 1955.

Whatever fears or regrets Grandma Higham might have had did not stop her from getting on with life that last summer. I’m told she made sure the larder was well stocked for Grandpa Higham when she was no longer around. What my uncles remember most is the 80 pints of strawberries she put up.

I wonder how I would spend my last summer.

A Love Story

It was love at first sight.

She was standing in the middle of the flower patch, hair in disarray, dirt on her nose, waving a pair of nasty shears and scolding me for cussing out the horse. I saw a fire in her eyes — determination, stubbornness — and I knew immediately she was the one. We married three months later. She stood by my side through thick and thin, through good times and bad.

Forty years later, I sit here, you lying in the hospital bed, I holding your hand, watching that light fade from your eyes. My heart breaks.

#99WordStory #HighamHistory #LoveAtFirstSight #FireInYourEyes #TrueLove #TheLightInYou #MargaretGHanna #FamilyHistory

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The backstory:

None of my mother, aunts or uncles knew how my maternal grandparents, Caleb and Mary, met. Both had emigrated to Canada, Mary in 1912 from Cornwall, Caleb in 1913 from Oxfordshire. Caleb was a farm labourer with dreams of owning his own farm. Mary was a domestic servant with dreams of a better life than she had in England. They married in June, 1915.

Their marriage licence states they both lived at Belbeck, a tiny village a few miles north of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. I like to think they found themselves working for the same farmer, Will Grigg, if only because they maintained a life-long friendship with Will and his wife Emeline.

Mary passed away in September 1955 from breast cancer, a few weeks shy of her 70th birthday. My grandfather was devastated. He passed away in May, 1979, not quite 90 years old. Both are buried at Congress Baptist Cemetery, from where you can see the farm that Caleb finally bought in 1924. They both had realized their dreams.

For Want of Water

We watched the slough dry up. We watched the soil blow away. We watched clouds roll in with empty promises of rain. We watched our crops struggle, shrivel and die.

We watched families move away. We watched businesses close. We watched villages disappear.

We feared the well would go dry. We feared rain would never come again.

This prairie that once held promises of bumper crops and full granaries was now only a distant memory, if it had even existed.

And all for lack of rain. For lack of water. For lack of caring how we treated the land.

#99WordStory #ForTheRain #GreatDepression #DirtyThirties #DustStorms #PrairieHistory #HannaHistory #HighamHistory #MargaretGHanna #OurBullsLooseInTown

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The Backstory:
Both my maternal and paternal grandparents struggled to farm through the terrible years of the Dirty Thirties. The rains left in 1929, they did not return until 1938. By then, it was too late for many families and for many towns. Southwestern Saskatchewan alone lost about 50% of its population during those years. They left for truly greener pastures – northern Saskatchewan and Alberta, or back east to Ontario and Quebec.

My grandparents lived in the heart of the Palliser Triangle, a region that Capt. James Palliser in the late 1850s called a desert and that, a decade later, John Macoun called a paradise. The difference: Palliser traversed this region of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta during a drought; Macoun during a wet period.

In 1935, the Canadian government formed the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA) which immediately launched several programs to help farmers deal with the drought. These included dugouts to store water, and strip farming and large-scale tree-planting programs to reduce erosion. Marginal land was turned into community pastures.

The PFRA no longer exists, but it helped transform dry-land farming practices to be more in tune with the vagaries of prairie climate. Perhaps we once again need the PFRA as we begin to comprehend the long-term effects of climate change on this fragile prairie region.

Tea for the Monarch

Mary stood before the glass-fronted cabinet. “I see you have Mother’s silver tea pot.”

“With the dent turned to the back,” Dorothy replied.

Mary chuckled. “Good thing her throw missed Father, she might have dented his head instead of the pot.”

“Remember how she toasted every monarch’s death and coronation with that tea pot?”

“Nothing but Twinings English Breakfast, if I remember rightly.”

Dorothy took the tea pot out of the cabinet. “I think we should revive her tradition, now that we have a new queen.”

“I hear she prefers Twinings Earl Grey tea.”

“With a dash of milk.”

#99WordStory #TeaRituals #TeaPot #TwiningsEnglishBreakfast #TwiningsEarlGrey #CreativeNonFiction #1952 #FamilyHistory #HighamFamilyHistory #Monarchy #MargaretGHanna

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The backstory:

In 1952, Mary, my maternal grandmother, returned to England (Cornwall, to be exact) to visit her two sisters, Dorothy and Clive. This was only a few months after Princess Elizabeth had succeeded to the throne as Queen Elizabeth II.

My maternal grandparents were staunch monarchists. They could list off all the kings and queens and their children and relatives and whom they had married, and they made sure their children (my mother and her siblings) knew all that as well. I assume they learned this from their parents, and my grandmother’s sisters were like-minded.

My grandmother’s mother, Amelia Appleton, did indeed throw her husband out when she learned he had been unfaithful. The story goes, she used language that would make a sailor blush. Whether or not she threw a tea pot at him, if a silver tea pot even existed, is pure speculation. But why let a few facts get in the way of a good story?

The Dare

“Chicken!”

“Am not!” John stamped his foot

“Are too!” Bob poked him on the shoulder.

John looked up at the granary roof that towered over his six-year-old head. All he had to do was jump. Bob and his friends had. He didn’t want to jump but neither did he want to be called “chicken.”

Pride won out.

He stood on the granary roof and looked down at the ground. “Jump!” they cried. John closed his eyes and leapt into the void.

“My arm!” he screamed.

Bob’s face turned white. “Dad’ll kill me!” The boys scattered like chaff before the wind.

#99WordStories #BeingDared #SiblingRivalry #Mischief #MargaretGHanna #AlmostTrueStories

The backstory:

Kids find ways to get up to all sorts of mischief. Farm kids seem to have a particularly wide assortment of opportunities. My brother and I certainly did. The above story is “inspired,” as Hollywood likes to say, by true events and people.

Bob and John were my mother’s two older brothers. Bob, the older of the two, was always getting John into trouble. At least that was John’s version of events.

So far as I know, neither of them leapt off a granary roof but I did, as did several of my friends. None of us broke an arm but I think one went limping home with a sprained ankle. Of course, this was yet another antic that we did only when our father wasn’t around. We knew there’d be h*** to pay if he caught us.