It occurs to me that most people that know me are only familiar with a small segment of my life. I don't know about you, but my life has been very compartmentalized. In these years, I was here, hung out with these people, in those years, these people, over there. And the different segments of my life have never met in the middle and blended themselves into a cohesive whole. I think this creates a kind of dissonance, a feeling of being disconnected from my true self. That's what I'm trying to overcome. So for those of you who have only known me in a certain context (that's just about all of you), I'd like to fill you in on the other details that are missing from the equation, the missing pieces of the puzzle.
I was born in the states, and got my Canadian citizenship when I moved to Canada at six months old. My mom is Canadian and my dad is American, but now has duel citizenship as well. My parents bought 360 acres of crown land in northern BC, a plot of mostly boreal forests and muskeg. They cleared and plowed about 20 acres of hay fields. For the first five years, we lived in a two bedroom house. We had some electricity and a shared, party line phone, but no running water. There was an outhouse in the yard. My parents hauled water from town, and to bathe her kids, my mom heated up water on the stove and poured it into a big metal basin in the middle of the kitchen. She was able to garden in the northern climate, potatoes, peas and lettuce grew especially well. They tried their hands at chickens and pigs, they had a milk cow and a couple of horses. My dad was a farrier and also worked at a sawmill, and my mom worked as a nurse.
Considering their big city backgrounds, my parents fit into life in the Canadian wilderness quite well. My dad trapped and traded furs, drove a snowmobile, and chopped wood in 40 below. He did hunting trips on horseback, and would come home every year with a moose for us to eat. He built a log house, three stories tall, with logs from our property that he cut himself. Many of these logs were so huge that a grown adult could wrap their arms around them and not touch their fingers together. The house was beautiful, and took forever to build, a big log house with a red roof, a bay window, and log pillar supports inside. We moved in when I was 5, around the time my youngest brother was born.
We lived there until I was 12. Mostly, we played outside, rode horses, skated on the dugout, built snowmen, climbed trees, played with our dog, a black lab, and argued with our siblings. But there were times we were snowed in, or when it was too cold to go outside. We played cards or dominoes, cops and robbers, cowboys and circus, did many many art projects, impromptu dance recitals and theater productions, and argued with our siblings. We read books. TV was something my parents were really strict about, and we only had one channel anyway, so there wasn't much to watch. Family TV on Sunday nights, pancakes for dinner.
My best friend lived a few miles down the road and had a reindeer farm. They once had an orphan reindeer that they adopted and fed with a bottle, called him Rudolf. At Christmas they would take 8 reindeer to town and show them off, ones with names like Cupid and Blitzen. My friend and I mostly spent our time riding horses, trail riding or preparing for horse shows (showing western in community fairs). We had plenty of adventures, a few that would have you sitting on the edge of your seat if I took the time to tell you them, horses falling in muskeg or running into bears on the trail. We were brave kids, fearless really, always trying to push the boundaries. Go a little further into the woods than we went last time, run the horses a little faster, explore a little bit more.
So that about covers the first 12 years, up until the time I moved to Alberta, which I'll have to write about some other time, since there's work to be done here. Thanks for reading. Enjoy your day!
