Vol.10, No.55, 2007
Every House A Home
By Beatrice Fines

Microwave ovens, cell phones, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, automatic garage door openers, timers, televisions and thermostats are counted among the necessities of life, these days. When I was a young country school teacher I lived in a house that had none of these, and yet, I remember it as one of the best homes I ever had.

This house was on a poor hard-scrabble farm in the Rainy River valley. It sat in a natural orchard of chokecherry, cranberry and wild plum trees. In the spring their blossoms filled the air with fragrance. They attracted dozens of birds of many kinds. Squirrels and chipmunks chattered at me as I walked among the trees.

Thick logs had been used for the ground floor walls of the house, boards for the second story. Both were weathered to uniform grey.

The kitchen boasted a huge wood-burning range and a cupboard with a bread board that provided a work surface. Linoleum, with traffic routes worn clear of pattern, covered the floor. But from that primitive kitchen came the most delicious roasts, casseroles, pies and cakes. The living room extended across the front of the house, with a dining table and sideboard at one end, a sofa with a cracked leather cover and a large rocking chair at the other. A heater stood in one corner. The floor was of pine boards, uncovered and scrubbed white once a week. Off to one side was a bedroom. My room was upstairs and was the only one up there where the studs were covered with wall board. The remaining upstairs rooms awaited a bonanza year when the crops would be good and the prices right.

In the winter my room was cold, even when the stove pipes from the heater glowed red. Water often froze in my wash basin. On such mornings my landlady often woke me by appearing with a kettle of hot water so I could wash. She was a lady of more than sixty years and somewhat lame with arthritis. Her husband was also lame, from a wound suffered during the war. In spite of these disabilities they eked out a living with hard work and judicious use of whatever the farm provided.

Without television and with a radio that didn’t always work, what did we do on long winter evenings? We played Monopoly or cribbage and we read books. Sometimes my landlady read aloud, bringing the book to life as only a born actress could. She was a woman of many talents, compelled by circumstance to display only the domestic ones. I never heard her complain about her lot. She greeted the world with philosophical humour. When the roof leaked she said ‘I always did want running water in the house.’

Later, during the early years of my marriage, housing was in short supply and as a result we often lived in houses that fell short of the standards of the time. But if the kitchen was too small, the stairs too steep, the bathroom fixtures antiquated, the windows drafty or the floors uneven, I could remember that old log house and realize that any house could be a home.

In Portage la Prairie we lived in a house that was almost a hundred years old. Though it had been upgraded to some extent over the years, it definitely showed its age. It had running water attached to the city system, and also had a large water cistern in the basement, with a pump at the kitchen sink to draw it up. This was because the water from the tap was incredibly hard. The cistern water, though soft, was fed by rain spouts and stained brown from the shingles on the roof. So a ‘water softener’ which produced water one slow cup at a time, was attached to the kitchen tap. During the winter a load of lake ice was purchased and melted, chunk by chunk, in a boiler on the kitchen range. To accommodate the cistern, certain supports had been removed and the house sagged down in the middle. As a result, the floors went down hill from the front door to the kitchen, then uphill to the backdoor. A trap door led to the dark and dingy cellar where a monster furnace lurked, demanding an unreasonable amount of fuel.

The kitchen range, once a wood-burner, had been adapted to burn oil and relieve us from wood chopping, fire tending and ashes removal. The only problem was that if the wind was in a certain direction, the stove back-fired and blew oily soot all over the kitchen. But Portage la Prairie at that time was over-crowded with servicemen and their families. As a result, most of our friends were living in ‘rooms’, small suites carved out of more spacious houses. We had space. So our old house became the gathering place.

Our home in Saskatoon, situated on the bank of the South Saskatchewan, had an over-abundance of windows, including those of a sunporch extending all across the front. By the time I had worked my way cleaning windows from front to back, from upstairs to downstairs, it was time to start over again. But I was often held captive on that sunporch, as a blazing prairie sunset spread across the sky brightening the city below.

In later years we lived in houses that possessed more modern amenities. Although I have appreciated these changes, I know they alone did not make each house a home.