Meant to do this post last night but I was waylaid doing other things. Sharing some entries from my Calendiaries….I love these walks down memory lane.

August 6, 1990

Went to the river to swim. Went to Gramma’s for a while. Shandy has measles. Someone’s bull got out. We thought it was ours so we chased it but then found out it wasn’t ours.

This entry cracked me up, I took a picture of it on the calendar and texted it to my Mom and Dad so they could hopefully have a laugh too. Shandy is my cousin, not sure why her having measles was notable lol. I wrote such mundane things. And the bull bit is funny, I don’t recall that actually.

When I said someone’s bull “got out”, I meant out of its fence or pasture or coral, out roaming. I’m not sure how we got our bull mixed up with someone else’s but all I can think of is it must’ve been far away in the middle of a field or something.

To the untrained eye, a cow is a cow is a cow. But when you’re a farmer, and especially because our herd was fairly small, you get to know and recognize each cow. When we were kids we used to name each baby calf as it was born.

August 7, 1991

Mom and I picked peas. Went to the store. Got ready to go camping. Jennifer picked me up at about 9:30 pm. Stayed over at her house.

We always had a large garden growing up. Picking peas is a finicky job. For those who don’t know, you can’t just grab and pull the pod from the vine because you’ll pull the whole vine out. You have to hold onto and secure the vine with one hand and then rip the pea pod off with the other. And you have to pick only the peas that are plump enough and ready.

Once they’re all picked they have to be shelled then blanched, frozen and ta-da!

The “store” I refer to is the Lenswood General Store about 3 miles from where I grew up. I’m sure it was one of the last ones in the whole province, to have still been in business. It was ran by a very nice old Ukrainian couple, Metro and Mary.

We called him “Metro from the store” as there were two Metro’s at that time, both were Metro Kobelka as well. To complicate things further, there were two Mary Kobelka’s lol. The other was married to a guy named Fred so to differentiate her from the Mary who ran the store, we called her “Fred’s Mary”.

Before I was born or maybe when I was very small, they actually sold clothing in the store. I remember seeing the remnants when I was a kid. Bell bottom pants that never sold.

For the most part, besides selling gas, it was more of a convenience type of store. Old hardwood floors that I recall feeling so smooth on my bare feet. It was not a “no shirt, no shoes, no service” type of establishment. I rarely wore shoes around home as a kid and would go to the store without shoes too.

If you showed up at the right time of day, when you walked in you’d find five or six old farmers, mostly Ukrainian, shitting around chewing the fat (and chewing their tobacco). As the kids say these days, the store was a vibe.

People had charge accounts, which I’m not sure really happens much anymore. My Dad would send us down there, either driving illegally or on bikes to get him cigarettes. He would just give them to us and mark it down, Dad paid the bill at the end of each month.

I remember thinking when I was a teenager and Mary was no longer around and Metro was getting on in age, how will I go on when this place shuts down? It was such a part of our childhoods, for the kids who lived in the area but even more so the grown ups. Metro knew my Dad since he was a child. Everyone knew everyone.

I vowed to take over the store and move there when I grew up and finished school just so that it would never be shut down. Unfortunately that never happened and Metro passed away and it did close down. So very sad.