COLUMN: Tales from the Gravel Ridge – Rosengard sounds that fill my memories

Memories of my childhood home and of Rosengard, the community in which we lived, fill my memory bank to overflowing. Among the many sounds of that era of long ago, is that of the school bell at the Rosengard School. Two of our grandchildren from Canada’s west coast spent a week of their two-week spring break with us. Needless to say, the school experiences of these eleven and thirteen year olds are vastly different from what ours were so many decades past. Nevertheless it is safe to say that many of the life lessons they are learning will stand them in good stead throughout their lives, much as we are reaping the benefits of ours of so many decades ago.

Memories of the school bell at Rosengard, ringing four times daily while school was in session, have a way of resurfacing from time to time. In a sense the school bell acts as a chronicle of that formative period in our lives, not because it supplies all the essential details, but rather because of the scenes it brings to mind.

Along with the school bell, of course, came other sounds at the Rosengard School. The laughter of children on the playground is surely one of the most enthralling of such memories; all but lost in the distant past, it nevertheless surfaces unbidden as we recall those carefree days from time to time. Following closely on the ringing of the school bell in the morning was the singing of “O Canada” our national anthem, and the reciting of “The Lord’s Prayer”. These opening exercises were followed by the roll call, when each student’s name was called out by the teacher, and each one responded by saying “present”.

Singing was an important part of our school program. We had no musical instrument in our school but fortunately our teachers knew how to sing and taught us a wide range of songs, many coming from the Manitoba School Songbook, and others from our respective teacher’s own repertoire. From my earliest memories of school, I also recall that we had a record player — a large portable black box which was normally stored in the school attic. On one occasion during those early years, I remember that this record player was brought down from its storage place. I can only recall the song “Listen to the Mockingbird” being played on that one occasion.

Our community, needless to say, produced many other sounds that marked our day to day lives. The buzzing of bees and the whining of mosquitoes, along with the sounds of crickets and frogs, augmented the songs of birds and the honking of geese, and the nightly summertime cry of the whippoorwill. All reverberated and portrayed the events of the warmest season of the year, along with raindrops splashing against windowpanes, and thunder drumming in the distance and then crashing overhead. The rustling of leaves in fall, and the sighing of the wind lazily snaking through the grass also had their place in our lives.

The sounds of Rosengard’s farmyards, and of our own farm in particular, are so firmly fixed in my memory that I cannot imagine my life without them. I suspect that those tones, and the qualities and characteristics they represented, played an important part in the way that my hearing and my ability to differentiate between various sounds, were developed. They also helped me to learn about the world around me, and to gain an appreciation for how to respond to sounds, and to distinguish between those that suggested a need for caution, and those that could be considered as being welcoming, such as perhaps the mewing of a kitten or the cheeping of a small chicken.

The sounds that must surely be most compelling in the context of understanding how I have developed and evolved, include the atmosphere of my home, and what it represents. These too come with a wide range of experiences and emotions, and find their meaning in my own individual responses to the world in which I live.