Section introduction
Still at home
includes the journals written between January 1958, when I was twelve and
in grade 7, and September 1963, when I was eighteen and leaving for college.
I should say something about the euphoria in many
of these entries. Some of it seems and probably was false; the true remnant
is relief at leaving the oppression and helplessness of childhood. Nobody
except my mother was interested in me when I was a child, but as an adolescent
girl I was intoxicated to discover that suddenly just about any man could
be made to be interested in me. I had real - though ambiguous - sexual
power, and this power rightly interested me a lot. At the same time, at
school, two male teachers were sponsoring me in ways that brought me other
kinds of attention too. By the end of high school I was honored and welcomed
in my community in ways I never had been as a child. So the Still at
home period was a steadily rising arc, and learning to guide that arc
now seems to me to be what these entries often are about.
Edit notes
Everyone I know who kept adolescent journals has
either destroyed or lost them. The adolescent period is intensely interesting
to the new person undergoing it, but its events and changes are too common
and their expression too unformed to be interesting to most adult readers.
I don't like boring readers or demonstrating so unequivocally that I wasn't
a prodigy, and the temptation to edit has been strong. I have resisted
it because in this project I'm as interested in formal change and continuity
as in emotional and intellectual change and continuity. If I transcribe
accurately, it will be possible to watch someone begin to write in an isolated
community in northern Alberta, and then to track stylistic changes over
more than sixty years. On the smaller scale of the Still at home
section, accurate transcription can demonstrate what maturation means grammatically.
If I retain spelling mistakes it's possible to see exactly where this writer
learns to spell difference. If I transcribe the twelve year old's
ellipses and exclamation marks, punctuation can be used to track the comings
and goings, and then the gradual disappearance, of a particular written
persona.
The originals of the Still at home years
are in small lined exercise books or on looseleaf sheets collected into
volumes by string tied through 3-ring binder holes. The originals' organization
into books was usually accidental; I have set volume breaks where I think
I can see significant shifts.
Beginning in March 1959 I sometimes interpolate
entries from a 5-year diary because they give more of a sense of daily
event.
Index pages for each of Still at home's
five volumes have page links as well as synopses in the form of lightly
edited excerpts.
Place
My parents farmed a section and a half three miles
by road from the northern Alberta hamlet of La Glace. It was on the southern
edge of Township 74, said by the surveyor Walter McFarlane about
1909 to be "black loam 3-8" deep over a clay subsoil, gently
rolling, nearly half covered with scattered bluffs of poplar and willow
scrub. 6" poplar, 6-8" spruce." Small amounts of upland
hay. Creek about 20 links wide, 2' deep, current about 2 miles per hour.
None of the lands liable to flooding. Our home quarter, NW2 ,was filed
in 1911 by William Kinderwater, an American school teacher who was 27 and
a widower at the time. Our closest neighbour, on NE2, continued to be his
brother Frank.
There was an earlier
small house and then around 1952 my dad built
the four-roomed house we lived
in for most of our childhood. This is what it looked like about 1955.
Family
My parents married young: she nineteen and he not much older.
I was born in 1945, two years later, my sister Judy three years after that,
Paul a year later. Here we are about 1955.
Both sets of grandparents were German-speaking
Russian Mennonite refugees. My mom's parents, Peter and Luisa Konrad, had
come to Canada penniless in 1930. My grandmother bore eleven children,
nine of whom survived childhood. My mother and her oldest brothers were
born in Russia but more aunties and uncles were born on the homestead.
When I was still a baby they left the homestead for a berry farm in the
Fraser Valley of BC where they were able to re-establish much of the familiarity
of their Siberian village life and flourished remarkably.
My dad's parents, Peter and Suzanna
Epp arrived in Canada also on the steamship Minnedosa from Antwerp
in July of 1924 , she 25, he 38, their passage paid by the members of the
Mennonite Church already in North America. Ewald, my dad, was the second
of their four children. They also homesteaded in Alberta but not long after
I was born were making their living on a small raspberry
farm near Yarrow BC.
Boy-craziness
Transcribing these early pages I was often impatient with their silliness.
There's an aspect of the early writing that's kind of camp - the
thirteen year old is at the age where she has to work up a gender style
but she's playing with it; she takes it over the top almost to drag and
with a kind of knowing irony as if to say, they want me to be feminine
and I might have to be to get what I want but wow isn't it silly. There's
something more troubled too. I look at the writing now asking why it's
so bad but what I should be asking is what work it's doing, what work other
people don't need to do. She's starved for touch - no one has touched her
since early childhood. She has been disliked at school and has to fight
to be seen as viable. Her father has said she's undesirable and she's frantic
to prove him wrong. And it's deeper than any of that. It's that she's unattached
in her family and constantly scanning for attachment outside it. I can
be sad for her now, that she had to be off-centre in the ways she was,
posing and insisting.
Reading
I began Grade 1 in the sort of one-room school my parents had been through
during the '30s but by the end of that first year we were in a new classroom
in a county school with grades 1 through 11. In the elementary grades I
was disliked and stoical at school, would sit in my desk reading through
recess, but I liked being there because it was warm and clean and there
were books.
Each September when we'd moved to a new classroom there'd be whole rows
of new books in the shelves under the windows. In Grade 3 they were fairy
tale collections I zoomed through gripped in ways I didn't then understand.
I'd quickly run through everything on the new shelves. There was a cot
next to the teacher's break room for kids who got sick during school hours
and next to it a bookcase with loan copies of '40s bestsellers like A
tree grows in Brooklyn, The keys of the kingdom and Green
Dolphin Street. I'd sneak into the empty corridor pretending to be
on a bathroom break, borrow a book and bring it back twenty-four hours
later. That pleasure ended when my mom looked into one of the books and
found a passage about a Gypsy woman having sex under a tree. She wrote
a note to the teachers. After that that I found the bookcase locked.
We went to a town library for the first time when I was about 10. I
was thrilled - sitting on the floor next to a bottom row of shelves - to
find LM Montgomery's Emily of New Moon, a book about a child writer
who loved the bush.
My parents didn't have time to read or money to spare so there were
hardly any books at home; I remember a small red Everyman of David Copperfield
and a short row of Reader's Digest Condensed Books my mom got for
free by subscribing to a book club. We had an encyclopedia though - the
15-volume Richards Topical Encyclopedia and its accompanying
7-volume geography set called Lands and Peoples - bought from a traveling salesman
when they couldn't have afforded it. My brother and sister and I spent
hundreds of hours with those volumes in our laps.
Religion
Religion comes up in these journals (for the last
time in Still at home) in a sometimes embarrassing way.
My family attended a small Mennonite Brethern
church that belonged to a larger synod of North American Mennonite Brethern
churches. The church itself was a small plain building out in the country,
on a hill two miles south of La Glace.
There are various kinds of Mennonite. Our kind
looked and dressed like any of the other farm families, but forbade smoking,
drinking, dancing, and movies. Mennonite Brethern doctrine included pacifism,
hellfire, 'getting saved', and adult baptism by immersion.
All the members of the La Glace MB church were
either first- or second-generation immigrants who had come to La Glace
as refugees from the Russian revolution and its aftermath. When I was a
child our little church carried on many of the traditions of church life
in Siberia. Men and women entered the church by different doors - women,
girls and very small boys on the right, men and older boys on the left
- and sat on opposite sides of the the aisle. Services included public
prayer, in which any church member who felt moved would pray aloud while
everyone stood shifting and shuffling around them. Hymns and sermons at
Sunday morning services were usually in German, although at evening services
we would use the little red Moodie songbook with its rousing hymns in the
English evangelical tradition.
By the time of the earliest journals, most of
the founding generation, including my grandparents on both sides, had moved
to BC, leaving the farms and the church to their kids - young adults who
had arrived from Russia as children and had gone to school in English.
This younger generation gradually dropped most of the Russian customs and
the use of German. They felt doctrinally compatible with Baptist and Alliance
churches, and they shifted the feel of the church toward those more mainstream
denominations. By the time I went away to university in 1963 men and women
could actually sit in the same pew. This younger generation - to give them
credit - also de-emphasized the hellfire aspects of evangelical belief
in favor of Christian love.
As I remember it, the best thing about this very
particular little church was its congregational singing. Our young parents
had sung in the choir together before they married each other and became
parents so they were trained sight-readers and glorious part-singers. Our
church was famous among our Norwegian neighbours, Lutherans and Pentecostals,
for its music.
Although they were admired as workers, the men
of the church were scorned for their pacifism through WWII, and distrusted
for their strictness about tobacco and drink. At school there were fewer
Mennonite kids than Norwegian. We weren't popular. The Dutch Reform group
was small, too, but they weren't thought priggish.
photo
by Reiner
