It’s a hottt Sunday evening and the house is somewhat stifling inside. We do have air conditioning but I refuse to use it. In a few days the temps are supposed to drop slightly and then we’ll have reprieve.

I think the heat we’re experiencing right now is summer’s last hurrah. I’ll be sad to see it go but at the same time I like the changing of the seasons and will welcome the cool crispness of fall. I’m just about ready for some serious nesting.

With some time on my hands right now and a fan blowing on me, I’m pouring over my Calendiaries to see if there’s anything worth sharing.

August 16, 1990

Went to Dauphin. Got my braces off. I have a retainer on. It is on the inside of my mouth so you can’t see it. The porch is still being built.

I guess getting braces off is kind of a big deal when you’re thirteen. My whole experience with braces was very odd I think. What needed to be fixed was the space between my front teeth that I’d had since my adult teeth grew in. I bore the nickname “Spacetooth” and sometimes “Spaceface” prior to getting that gap fixed. I wore the braces for only six months. Which seems like a weirdly short period of time. I’ve never known anyone else, including my own kids, to wear braces only six months.

The orthodontist had wanted to continue with a Phase Two, he called it, and remove some teeth or something and have me wear an appliance that would eventually cause me to have less of an overbite. My parents said no. I was fine with that decision.

The retainer they put in after taking the braces off was just a little wire they glued to the inside of my four front teeth. I think it was supposed to stay for two years but I kind of just forgot about it and I didn’t get it removed until about the ten year mark.

The crappy thing about these orthodontist appointments was we had to drive two hours there and two hours back each time. Our town didn’t have any orthodontists and so they had referred us to Dauphin. Which is not a super exciting place to go. All I really recall about those trips to Dauphin was Phil Collins. Listening to my Phil Collins tape on my walkman, riding in the backseat. Yikes, really aging myself there.

August 11, 1991

Dad started swathing. Hrycyk’s started combining. It’s hot. Corinne’s been gone six weeks. Dad and Gena and I went fishing. Washed clothes.

Dad starting to swath the fields marked the beginning of harvest season. I find it funny that I remarked our neighbour’s, the Hrycyk’s, had already started combining. This meant they were ahead of us in the race of harvest. Well it’s not actually a race but every farmer is looking at what the others are doing.

More than likely Hrycyk’s had straight cut combines (I think that’s what they were called, it’s been a while since I had to conjure up that word), which meant the swather was on the front and the back was the combine so you swathed and combined at the same time. My Dad didn’t have such fancy machinery. He had a swather, which cut the crop. After it layed and dried, you went over it again with the combine, which picked up the swath and extracted the kernels of grain.

Corinne, my older sister, spent that summer in Bragg Creek, Alberta with my Aunty Janice and Uncle Roy. I saw that I remarked somewhere in these journals that I moved into her bedroom while she was gone. My only chance to have my own room since I shared with my younger sister Gena.

I don’t know why we always said “washed clothes” instead of “did the laundry”. To this day my Mom still says she washed the clothes. Laundry is not in her vocabulary for some reason. And washing clothes always happened on a Monday and I think she still follows that.

August 12, 1992

Went to Gramma’s in the morning. Helped Dad load grain after dinner then left for Yorkton just before supper. Got a room at the Imperial 400.

Geez, sometimes I sound so backwoods Laura Ingalls it’s not even funny. Want to know what my friends were doing with their summer holidays? Not this kind of stuff lol.

When I said “load grain”, I’m not exactly sure what I meant. This was harvest time so you are getting all the grain off the fields and into the grain bins. Where it usually sits until winter when you have down time, that’s when you load it onto big trucks and haul it to town and sell it to a grain buyer. Possibly, Dad wanted to get a load of grain to town and sell it right at that time though. Maybe it was rainy or something and so working in the field wasn’t possible. I’m not sure.

Since we were a family that didn’t really travel much, making the two hour drive to the much larger centre, Yorkton, was a treat. We did it maybe once or twice a year. Yorkton is just over the Saskatchewan border and was a city of maybe 13,000 people back then, maybe less. But our town had only 5000 so it felt huge.

It was the first place I ever ate McDonald’s. It had a shopping mall also. So two points for it right there. The town near where I grew up, Swan River, only got a McDonald’s last year!

Even though it was only two hours away, this particular time that we went, just to make it into a little holiday, we stayed in a hotel. It had a waterslide and I recall my sisters and I going down over and over and over again. My favourite way to go down was head first on my stomach. I remember the next day having these huge purple bruises over both of my hip bones. Sign of a great time I guess.