Cons of The Easy Life

Up where I lived, on the North side of Lake Athabasca, up near the North West Territories on the Saskatchewan border barren lands, was the coldest weather I ever experienced.  Traditionally, the men would go out to hunt caribou together and the women, when they knew to expect them, would walk together to break paths in the snow to help make the men's last few miles home, easier.  How anyone coped with the cold in the far north is beyond me.  We are spoiled.  We want everything warm, neat, cool, perfectly perfect for ourselves and have come a long ways from remembering the winters' of our Grandmothers. 

So much of Winter is romanticized.  We think the old day's Winter as beautiful quilts and aroma of wood smoke but, for our grandmother's it was not an easy life.  Women and children did not get paid for cooking, cleaning, child care, small animal care, gardening, and all the usual caps a woman can put on her head to define what she did.   Mothers got up before anyone to light some kind of way of lighting the area, start the fire and prepare something to eat;  something hardy, something that would stick to the ribs, like oatmeal mush, wheat mush, frybread (or any other name a quick bread can be called), etc.  Usually, she did this wearing several layers of bulky clothing to keep her warm.  Damp, wet wool smell permeated the home because someone always got damp, or wet, the day before and clothing had to be dried.  

Women always had some handwork to do once the morning chores were done.  Her hands would be busy with tanning, scraping, sewing hides into something efficient against the cold.  There was never time for pretty, there was only time for making.  Whatever the weather, she had everything to do with home, health, and hearth during her day.  While we might have the idea of a crackling fire and braided rugs, it was far from that.  Sometimes the animals were just below the floorboards of a house in order that the family could receive some of their heat.  Sometimes the rest of the family would stay under their bedding hides and hibernate on the worst of winter days.  But not the mother, the wife, the oldest daughters.  There was corn to rehydrate, there were beans to put into a swinging pot over a hearth fire.  There was typically a stew (typically a vegetable and less likely meat because game was scarce and vegetables were stored somewhere safe)  on the go for the entire day and people ate when they were hungry, and there was food, not at set times.  No one refused to eat what little there was.  

The mothers made sure, when the men build their shelter/home, that the hearths were huge, to be used for heat, drying, cooking, heating, etc. and would be made of stones that would hold the heat.   No matter how roughshod, a woman was expected to keep a home clean, neat, and spiritual including the inviting aromas of bread, stews, and have no dust motes from the sod floor.  Truly, it was drudgery and it was everyday survival.  Women were to keep everyone alive, men were hunters and protection.  Every day, the same old, same old.  Women heated water, she often got from streams, springs, pumps, and laundry to be done, dishes to wash, big metal pots scorched from the fire in the hearth.  There was patchwork to be done, clothing to repair or make.  Every child had some kind of important work to do to help that they all survived.  

Tensions and stress to try to keep things tidy and, for sure, doing it cheerfully.  Women were often exhausted and died before their time because thyey were called to work so hard.  There was no time for sickness, for expressions of distress, for mental issues, for sorrow.  A women put one foot in front of the other and busied her hands every moment of every day.  She could know some of medicinal herbs, what foods to eat in the winter in order to belay flues and colds.  And she would ache and find something to alleviate the ache.

Her house often had a loft where blankets and hides were laid.  All the beds needed to be aired, often, for all the critter reasons.  There were chamber pots to be emptied.  Stones, to heat for nighttime to be put at the foot of the beds, had to be brought down from the loft and readied for nighttime's reheating.   Every morning there was some kind of preparation for finding enough to make a hearty soup and have it cooking and kept warm for the whole day.  

Morning's washbasins had to be used on a rough hewn wood floor, or used to clean the pisspots, then thrown out.  Chickens had to be fed and let out of the night cover.  Children's hair had to be brushed, faces to clean and clothes to be checked for inevitable rips and smudges, if they were hiking off to school, or simply for health.  Usually, if they even had cows, the women milked the cow(s) , leaving enough for calves, and there were many ways to keep and to use that milk and that was not the end to it, the milk had to be strained through a cloth and then the cream they could skim off and butter to be churned.  My grandmother continued to do this, after Grandpa milked the cows and brought the milk in.  And, oh the treats she would make when the cows gave lots of extra milk.  The milk was kept in cans and put in the inside spring in the barn, and the rest was brought to the house and brought into the back entrance.  The ever present cat(s) got their little bowl because they were the mouse catchers.  

The meat and garden vegetables were kept in the root cellar, and the cellar was usually either off the kitchen or out further and someone had to go and get them if the children were not old enough.  

At night, the coals in the hearth needed to be banked, breakfast had to be laid out and ready to prepare for morning, kids needed to be cleaned as best she could before they went to bed with soap she had made and water she had fetched and warmed, and stones taken to keep their feet warm at night.  She would drop to her bed and wake before the rooster crowed.

We are so lucky to have modern appliances and ways to do our job.  Yes, they dreamed up new things to keep clean and new things to use, and new things to make.  How did they ever cope?

Part of coping was not about how sad, how negative, how hard, how badly they had it or how difficult living was.  Sometimes I have to remember the women of the North and how, after all they had to do, they did more, and showed gratitude for their hunters by going out into the blizzard freezing night, with torches, to make the last few miles easier for those men of theirs.  I am one generation away from my grandmother's pioneering life.  

In one generation, my life is so much easier.  For some, who live in the far North, they still wait for their hunters to come home from where there is no cell phone access and they have been hunting in traditional ways. I was thinking of my friend, who was my Director of Education, a four and a half hour fly-in to the community, who has cancer and has been taking chemo, in the nearest city, while her husband is up in the barrenlands hunting.  She needed to get hold of him.  They had to relay information to him by skidoo.  While she is in the city, she is making gifts of beaver gauntlets and moccasins for her family for Christmas, in her hotel room.  We simply forget how hard it CAN be and how easy we have it some times.

Today, when I really think I am hard done by, I try to write down the things 'bothering me', and on the reverse side, I write a positive response to that whine.  It does not take long to 'get over' it all.  We can only imagine what our Grandmothers' hard winter's were like.  We have to buck up and deal with our stuff that really is not life and death.  Perhaps we have too much time on our hands.  Perhaps, because our lives are easier in so many other areas in our lives, we have become emotionally charged.  It only takes a minute to remember how hard life was for our foremothers.  Our lives are so much easier.  How many of us have had to tramp down miles for our hunters who have been days , weeks, out on traplines or hunting and we are more conscious of other's hard times rather than centered on our feelings?  

©Carol Desjarlais 12.20.19