Biography Part 5

The ranch was located about 10 miles from a small town called Hillspring with a population of 500 people, mostly farmers. Hillspring was located in the southern part of Alberta in Canada. It wasn’t all bad, because the house we lived in, with the backyard magical forest, was supplied by the church at no charge and we could have as many animals as we wanted. We had chickens, turkeys, a goat, sheep, cows and of course cats and a dog named Scamp. He was half wolf and half German Shepard. My dad treated the land like it was his own and nurtured it with love and care. On some days in the winter, I remember for supper all we had to eat was “bread and milk” fresh bread and fresh cow’s milk. Now this may sound icky to some of you, but it wasn’t too bad, especially when there was homemade jam to put in it. The recipe is broken up bread in a bowl with milk poured over the bread and jam mixed in the milk. If it was strawberry jam, then it tasted like strawberry bread and milk. That was our supper. If we had a good season, my dad would butcher a cow and we would have meat in our freezer and hopefully it would last through the year. We also had large vegetable gardens in the summers which I helped harvest even as a small child.