We snuggled with Daddy on the couch and after our Bible story he began to talk about living on a farm—about chickens and ducks and geese and gathering eggs, about playing in the barn and buying a cow and calves and pigs. It all sounded absolutely delightful! Actually, he had already traded the store for a farm up north—sight-unseen. His doctor had told him he needed to get out of the stress of business and try farming to ease the long-term effects of polio on his nervous system.

So we loaded a truck with all our possessions, including my budgie bird, a pregnant cat, and a stupid, lovable Irish Setter that rode in a wooden crate tied to the roof of the cab. Off we drove for 200 miles on gravel roads to a remote place up north called Carrot River. Within a half mile of our farm, the road suddenly ended. A heavy spring run-off had washed out the bridge.

However, the neighboring farmers alerted one another, met us there, unloaded our truck, hauled all our stuff over the swollen stream on planks, drove it half a mile, then carried it over another bridge-washout at our driveway. Without telephones, electricity, or affluence, these neighbors had learned to care for one another. These were tough men and women with large families—survivors, who had carved out their homesteads by hand and made a hard living by farming the rich northern soil.

Inside our farmhouse kitchen stood a woodstove, a few cupboards and a sink without faucets. Under the sink sat a five-gallon slop pail to catch the dishwater and food scraps. On the counter we put a pail of water with a dipper for drinking. Every gallon we pumped from the well had to be carried in and out. Mommy heated water for our baths on the woodstove in a large kettle to add to a three-foot-square, galvanized tub set in the middle of the kitchen floor. We bathed in turn from youngest to oldest. We used the outhouse in the daytime and a chamber pot at night.

In the middle of the old linoleum kitchen floor, a trap door opened into a hole in the ground called a root cellar. A small living room extended to the right of the kitchen followed by my parent’s small bedroom. To the left, an oversized hallway led to stairs ascending to the unfinished attic. Dickie and I slept in the hallway. When evening came, we often sat outside but had to light smudge pots of peat moss and dry leaves to smoke away the mosquitoes. In the house at night, we used coal oil lanterns for light.

That spring Dicky and I eagerly explored every nook and cranny of the farm. I can still remember the pungency of oil in the old sheds, smells of rich black earth, wet peat moss emerging from the snow, pussy willows bursting, and green things growing. We rode our bikes all over the muddy farmyard, that is until my bike tipped and I fell into a patch of hive-raising nettles—my first clue that farm life had it’s dark side.

A few yards from our house stood the pump shack and a storage shed. We always primed the pump by pouring water into it and then pumped like crazy. Without a refrigerator, Mother hung food in a pail down in the well to keep it cold. Daddy bought her a wringer washer and put up a clothesline. They put in a huge garden beside the barn where the soil was most fertile. The vegetables grew quickly during the long days of sunlight this far north. We had to help Mommy keep the garden weeded, which I don’t remember as fun at all.

In summer, lots of company came from Saskatoon and Dalmeny—so much company! When they came, they always filled the car with as many people as they could get in it and stayed for days. Some even stayed a couple weeks with their whole family for their vacation. Mommy baked and cooked for the whole gang on her woodstove and bought flour by the 100-lb. bags.

I can’t even imagine how my mother could work so hard with no modern conveniences. She was young, strong, resourceful, independent and a graduate of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, where she and two of her sisters sang on the BIOLA Hour radio program as the Schultz Trio. After graduation she made plans to go to Africa as a missionary and packed her trunk to go. When God closed that door, He opened another one in Dalmeny for her to teach Bible school and lead their choir. That’s where and when she met my dad. They married in Dallas, Oregon but returned to Saskatchewan.

Proverbs 16:1 says, “To man belong the plans of the heart, but from the LORD comes the reply of the tongue.” God did not call my mother to Africa, but to primitive living in northern Saskatchewan. Though her sisters lived in beautiful, modern homes with all the advantages of affluent American living, God gave Mom a calling with the strength and grace to live with so much less. I saw her live among these farm folk, become one of them, and minister the practical love of Jesus to them.

As I grew, my growing independence clashed with Mom’s management skills many times, yet I look upon her now as my hero, my mentor, my role model for strength and faithfulness. She carried 1Cor. 15:58 as her life verse, Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord. Mother paved a road for me that I can walk because I know He leadeth me, He leadeth me; by His own hand He leadeth me. His faithful follower I would be, for by His hand He leadeth me.