We went on longer trips too when we lived in Redmondville. But I only have the sketchiest recall of most of those trips.Being able to go places must have seemed like one of the biggest advantages to having moved back to New Brunswick for my parents.In Goose Bay,there'd been no real place to go.You could drive around on the few roads they had,but getting anywhere outside the immediate area was difficult.The roads were said to be bad,and to go to anyplace like Montreal,or the rest of Canada.You would have had to have taken a boat...at least one boat.
In Redmondville we were not all that close to where either of my parents called home,and the roads back then were not all that well kept,but it was still just a few hours to either Canterbury or Springhill. In my mind,the idea of being in Springhill doesn't belong to that time.My first memory of being there was after we moved to Moncton,a year or so later.But Canterbury was a different story.
I can vaguely recall being on the old farm,out in Dead Creek when I was very small,no more than a toddler.The farm was a really rough sort of a place,a long way of any major highway.It was located on the side of a hill that some people called a mountain.The farm house was rough inside,I'm not certain how many rooms it had,but I had no real sense of there being any doors between the rooms.Just curtains maybe.My grandfather grew some crops on the land,but it would be hard to imagine anything more than subsistence crops growing there.Corn and potatoes and root vegetables,but nothing you could sell for a lot of cash.The land wasn't really good,and it would grow over very quickly if left untended for only a few years.My grandmother would take us to the barn where she had cows and pigs,and I can recall her feeding chickens from her apron,and gathering eggs too,which was easier to do when they were eating.
The land all around Dead Creek was rough.A lot of farms even then were abandoned,the people having moved to one or another city,or maybe just a few miles into town.There was nothing like a blacktop road anywhere near,and one of the thing that sticks in my mind from the very earliest time in my memory is of dust.Sitting on the outer porch you could always tell a car was coming,or going by the plumes of dust.Dust got everywhere.On the windows and cars,and on clothes.And by evening I was always covered in it.There was no bathtub at my grandparents farm,but I remember being bathed in a tub out of galvanized metal. My grandmother kept that old tub even when she moved into town a few years later.Sometimes she kept potatoes or apples in it,and I was able to determine how small I was then by looking at the size of that tub.About the size of a bushel basket,maybe a bit smaller.Dust penetrated my grandfathers old blue car too.In fact,he kept that car into the mid 1970's,and it was never free of the dirt that embedded itself in those seats when they lived out on the farm.
The only other thing I recall about visiting Canterbury,or Dead Creek was once standing out in the yard of a small farm just down the road from where my grandparents lived,with an old,tiny,stooped and very old woman,who was trying to focus my attention on watching some bluebirds sitting on a wooden fence.They may have been jays,or actual bluebirds.I really have no idea.But we also saw a woodpecker that day,and there was a small owl way up in the barn too.I loved to go in the barn,and this particular barn,along with all the other animals also had white woolly sheep,which I'd never seen before.
We made one trip to Charlottetown too.I was very small at that time,and it was winter.You still had to cross on a boat then,and I recall standing in a window,looking down at the water and watching the boat split the ice and push it aside.The purpose of that trip,as I recall was to visit my uncle,William Davis,who was with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,and must have been stationed in Charlottetown at that time.I really don't remember anything about my uncle or his family at that time.I think they could have only had the one child at that time.I only recall the time on the boat coming and going,and the ice in the water.
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