COLUMN: Tales from the Gravel Ridge – A place of belonging

To have a place to call home, a place where you know you belong, is a priceless treasure. And should you leave for a period of time, be it for studies or employment, or for other reasons, to know that you are welcome to return at any time, is a treasure beyond measure. Perhaps such a place need not necessarily be only a home in a conventional sense, but also a community where you are welcome to share your experiences or your skills. A sense of belonging may well have wide parameters.

Growing up in a community where you are always viewed as being part of that place, regardless of your experiences or your economic circumstances, is tantamount to being, in a broader sense, at home.

The community of Rosengard was such a location. It was the place where I drew my first breath, within the warmth of my parental home, located on a spectacular gravel ridge. That ridge had established itself long before the farming families I came to know over the years, had come to call it their home. The uniqueness of this magnificent landscape was etched over eons of time as glacial Lake Agassiz drained eventually into what is now known as Hudson Bay.

We hear much about homelessness today. Many the world over are displaced due to wars, internal strife and instability, and various environmental disasters of enormous proportions. Others may well be homeless within their own communities for reasons that can vary from person to person.

Sometime during the late 1930s, during the Great Depression, my immigrant family was under very difficult financial constraints, and lost the farm that had been home for them since shortly after their arrival in Canada. Regrettably, such experiences were not uncommon during that era of worldwide financial turbulence. One day an agent for National Trust, being a well-known local individual, along with the sheriff came to inform our parents that the farm was no longer theirs. Being immigrants, my parents did not speak English, nor were they familiar with options that might have been available to them for renegotiating the sales agreement with the trust company. Ben, my eldest brother, recalled that when he and his siblings came home from school that afternoon, our father told them they would “not have to do their chores that day”. The livestock no longer belonged to the family. Ben remembered as well that when the sheriff was also going to take their horse, my father restrained the horse by its bridle, insisting that in fact the horse was not part of the original purchase. The farm was subsequently sold to friends of the local agent.

Some years ago, the late Jack Thiessen shared with me that when my parents and their young family were leaving the farm that had been taken from them, they stopped at the home of their neighbours, the Thiessen family, to bid them farewell. The Thiessens were not strangers; they were close neighbours.

After living in rented premises for a period of time, my parents purchased a farm in Rosengard on Sept. 28, 1938, from Julius and Katharina Block. This farm was where I was born and the place I called home until my mother sold it in spring, 1961, my father having died in 1959. In spite of the fact that I left the farm at various times, for education and employment opportunities, I nevertheless always felt at home in this place and in this community. It was a place where I belonged.

A number of years ago I received a request from Martha, the youngest member of the Block family, concerning details of the house my family had purchased from her parents. My brother Mick and I both independently sketched a floor plan of the house. Both of us were delighted at how similar our respective memories of that old house were. Although Mick was fifteen years older than I, and the old house had been dismantled early in the 1950s, we nevertheless remembered the same details of the place that had meant so much to us so long ago.

As we journey through life, various details continue to remind us of our interconnectedness with past events. After I graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba in 1972, I articled with Stan Farwell, a lawyer, who was the Manager of National Trust at the time. It was only when my eldest brother Ben subsequently informed me that it had been National Trust that owned our family farm which we had lost so many years ago, that I realized the irony of it. Sometimes our lives take an interesting turn of events..