Philgrim’s Blogress

For our friends who haven’t already heard, both Luke and Charlotte are planning to go to England.

They will be staying in a flat on Pelistry farm, i.e. in the same yard as their Grandma and Grandpa Bird and their uncle and aunt Mervyn and Stephanie and cousins Jon, Dan and Adelle.

Because their mother is British, they automatically have dual citizenship, so they can legally find work in England.  They will help on the farm, but they also hope to find work in the tourism sector once summer arrives.

Charlotte won’t leave until she has graduated from high school at the end of June, but Luke plans to buy his airline ticket as soon as his British passport arrives (the Canadian passports have arrived already).

This is a great opportunity for them to experience a part of the world outside of the town they grew up in.  And the Isles of Scilly is a great place for an artist to build one’s art portfolio.

The nest is emptying.  It’s going to feel different around here.

Our family plays more board games during this Christmas and New Years time than at any other time of the year.  We’ve re-discovered Monopoly this year.  And of course we needed to have at least one game of Scilly Gold.

It’s Christmas Eve, and I took a vacation day.

While I have been running around getting last-minute buying done, Janet has been filling the house with the amazing smell of baking.

Buns, bread, and Amish Cinnamon loaves – I am truly blessed.

At supper we will again light the four Advent candles of hope, peace, joy and love.

After supper we’ll be off to the church for the Christmas Eve service.  It’s usually one of the better-attended events of the church year.

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Tomorrow we will light the Christ candle, as the waiting of Advent will be over. And of course there will be gifts and eating, including the fresh baking.  No lutefisk or gammelost, despite my Norwegian heritage, but I did find lefse at Harold’s Fine Foods.

It’s at time like these, when Saskatchewan is frozen in the remorseless grip of a prairie deep-freeze, that Janet must ask herself, “what was I thinking?”.

NASA image of the Isles of Scilly.

Farming didn’t work out really well for Grandpa.  Maybe if the soil had been more productive the farm would have prospered, but those grey luvisolic soils are better suited to growing trees than grain.  Even the few cattle that he pastured didn’t provide much income.

Somewhere in his early life, perhaps before he changed his name from Lars to Louis, he had picked up enough building skills to be able to craft his first home out of logs using traditional Norwegian techniques.  He soon learned to build using more standard 2X4 stud wall frame construction, began to build houses for neighbouring farmers, and eventually carpentry became his primary occupation.

Many of the houses and commercial buildings that he built are still standing in and around Shell Lake.  Those solid buildings continue to testify to the quality of his workmanship.

So here is a concert video of John Prine performing “Grandpa Was A Carpenter”.

… Grandpa was a carpenter
He built houses stores and banks
Chain smoked Camel cigarettes (actually he chewed Copenhagen snuz)
And hammered nails in planks
He was level on the level
And shaved even every door
And voted for Eisenhower
cause Lincoln won the war … (actually he left the USA before he was old enough to vote)

(cousin Roger – I know you could see this coming).

When Janet gets frustrated with me, she has been known to refer to me as a “stubborn Norwegian.” I admit to being more stubborn than I should be, but I’m a relative puppy-dog compared to Grandpa Louis Loseth.

I mostly remember Grandpa as a quiet man whose most remarkable trait (to me) was the fact that he chewed “snuz” – I think it was the Copenhagen brand. Since Grandma wouldn’t stand for a spittoon in the house, Grandpa would occasionally lift himself creakily from his chair, shuffle over to the wood-burning cook stove, and drizzle a stream of brown stuff into the firebox. This was fascinating to a kid from a tobacco-free house.

Although I never had much chance to observe his stubbornness first-hand, I heard stories, including the one about his fur-selling trip.

Homesteading in the first decades of the 1900s in the Shell Lake area wasn’t easy. Summers were spent clearing brush and picking rocks to create tillable fields. Winter wasn’t a time of leisure, but a time to earn some extra money by logging or trapping.

One year Louis had trapped enough squirrels, muskrats, beavers and weasels, and maybe a mink or two, to result in a respectable-sized bale of cured furs, enough to weigh heavily on his shoulders. However he was tough as nails, so the 5-mile walk from his homestead to the village of Shell Lake didn’t faze him.

When the local store-keeper inspected the furs and offered him far too little money, Louis quietly packed the furs up again and set out walking to the village of Mildred, another 11 or 12 miles down the trail, where he finally agreed to a selling price.

I don’t know if he agreed that it was a fair price, but legend has it that if it wasn’t he’d have been willing to walk to Spiritwood, seven more miles further west, out of principle.

Apparently when he returned home to his family, much later than expected, he was carrying a 100-pound sack of flour on his back (well, maybe it was a 50-pound sack).  Grandma had been worried sick, but he had provided for his family, so he was satisfied with himself.

I appreciate the way that Grandpa modelled perseverance and a strong work ethic for his descendants. However Janet doesn’t appreciate at least one gene that the stubborn old Norwegian passed down to me.

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END NOTE: My apologies to any living relatives if I’ve exaggerated this story – if so, call it artistic license – however I think it’s fairly close to the way I heard it, but you know how family histories can morph over time.