QOTD: What were You Like as a Wee Little Crasser?

What kind of town or city did you live in? Did you travel around much?

Did you have you own bedroom, or have to share with someone?

Did you have pets?

What was your primary or elementary school like? Do you remember any teachers in particular?

Do you do sports?  Were you a bookworm?

Did you have a nickname? How did you get it? Did you like it or hate it?

Did you go to church or Sunday school? Willingly, or got dragged there?

Did you know your grandparents?

Can you remember your first crush? Was it reciprocated? Were you teased about it?

***

Our small family lived in a small, remote northern Canadian town. Its one industry was the paper mill. There were logging camps in the forests (called “the bush”) all around. My father was the public (grades K-8) principal, which was exactly the way you are imagining it was for his kids, me, my younger brother and my older half-sister.

There wasn’t much travel, except down to Toronto (OMG the excitement! Sears! Eatons! riding the subway!) once or twice a year.

Even then I hated sports, and was a bookworm. My parents always read bedtime stories to us, so I guess that’s where it started.

My father had a nickname for me, Tunka. No idea what it meant of where it came from. We always had a dog, medium to large sized. Mutts at first, but then my father went into his English Gentleman period and then there were purebreds that we couldn’t afford.

Never knew my grandparents, they were back in England (the maternal set) and Scotland (the paternal set)

I got dragged to Sunday school and, for a while church – Anglican – but it never came close to sticking.

What I mostly remember is that it was the NORTH. The snow, the cold, the cold, the cold, the shrieking blizzards. The hurt-your-eyes gleaming beautiful fields of snow under intensely blue, pure, cloudless winter skies.  The river frozen solid from November to May. People going through town on snowmobiles.

The bank (singular) and store (singular) with powercords outside so you could plug in the bock-heater of your car while you were inside.  At 50 below F, it might not start again if you were inside too long. The grown-ups muttering about black ice. Having a shovel, jumper cables, a bag of grit and an old parka or two always in the trunk of the car.

It was awful, and yet it wasn’t, because you walked along to school isolated inside your little fortress of clothing that weighed more than you did. Socks, shoes, galoshes, maybe snow pants, heavy wool skirt and sweater, tights, thick coat, hat, scarf wound around your head with your eyes and nose and nothing else sticking out. That morning you’d heard the grown-ups talking about how it had been -72 overnight so you peered out from the wraps of your scarf a little awed and, also, a little impressed.

 

Top image: Wikimedia / Bottom image: Wikimedia

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