This was the house that we lived in at Ear Falls, Ontario, CANADA - well, not exactly. It is the second house, if you could call the first one a house - more on that later. Ear Falls is not on all the maps of Ontario - you have to find the right one. It is on the English River, and I remember the great fishing there :-) To me these were the best years of my life.

I helped my Dad to build the planter boxes that Mom wanted - that is I got in his way once in a while ;-) We got them built and hung under the 2 windows which you can see in the photograph. We had some of the prettiest flowers in the colony. We also ate well as you can see our vegetable garden in back of the house to the left. The white building in the background to the right is the school house - all 12 grades in one room. The light line on the left side above the vegetable garden and below the trees is the road (highway as some called it).

We had a dog, Skippy. Skippy was a cross between a female water spaniel and a male St. Bernard - the only 2 dogs in the colony at that time. Skippy would take my baby brother's left hand in his mouth and lead him across the road and along a deer path into the bush. A short way into the bush there was a small creek that flowed across the deer path and into the English River. The creek was at its widest perhaps 3-4' across and only a few inches deep with small pebbles lining the entire bottom of it. It was very pretty. To the left of the path there was a small clearing among the trees where the sun's rays reached the creek. Here I would find my brother splashing in the water while Skippy kept a close eye on him. The first time that Frank went "missing" my mother panicked. I knew about the deer trail as I used to go there and Skippy would come along with me. Immediately I headed in that direction. Sure enough! When I came to the stream there were Skippy & Frankie enjoying themselves, Skippy resting on the bank in the sunshine and Frank sitting on a rock beside the stream and poking a twig into the water. He was having a great time. I took them home much to the relief of my mother.

Ear Falls was in the land of the First Nation Ojibwa. I played more with them than I did with the other kids in the colony. I enjoyed going fishing, walking through the bush, reading animal tracks and sign, etc.. It was a carefree time. I was lucky enough to have Mr. Young (an Ojibwa) take me out in the winter on his trapping runs a couple of times. There I learned about the beaver, the lynx and the weasel. One winter we were running an ermine line. I was surprised to learn that not all weasels turned a beautiful white with black spots in winter. White, yes, but the spots really varied. The prime pelts could bring up to $150 each, but few were prime. Usually the spots were not very uniform and most brought about $50 to $60 with some going as low as $40. It was not an easy way to make a living, but it brought one into touch with Mother Earth. I learned a lot from my First Nation friends.

Our first house...how to put this...was not what one would usually call an house. It was a 2"x4" framed structure covered with 1" thick boards and tar paper over those on the outside. The roof was similar. There was one small window in the back wall over a small sink that drained directly to the outside, and a door on the front wall to enter by. On the whole the "tar paper shack" was about 8'x12'. It had no insulation. It had no interior walls. There was a light bulb that hung from the middle of the ceiling, and a small wood stove for cooking and heating rounded out the interior décor. It was sparse, to say the least. We slept on the floor.

When the evening temperatures started to drop in the fall mice would chew their way through the boards into our "home" and scoot all over us at night. That prompted Dad to buy several mouse traps. They worked nicely :-) Mom became very proficient at baiting, setting them and removing the caught mice. Dad chopped wood, and we kept fairly warm in the winter even with temperatures being not all that cold at -40 degrees F.. Toilet? Dad dug a temporary hole and built an outhouse over it. It served its purpose. In the winter we used a "thunder mug" at night and covered it with paper until daylight when Mom emptied it. Water came from a shallow well that Dad dug. If I remember correctly, he put the hand pump in the house. Gee, we had all of the modern conveniences that one could ask for ;-)

In the spring Dad and some of his co-workers enlarged the house into 3 rooms - we were now really living high ;-) Our first home was across the English River from Ear Falls, close to the trading post called Little Canada. Later a house became available in Ear Falls, and we moved into it, as pictured here. This was really modern living :-)