Memoir-Chapter One.

We decended from out of the north,into a time I can recall and that I can relate to you.It must have been around 1963,a couple of years after I was born in Goose Bay.

Redmondville is the first home I can remember,on the northeast coast of New Brunswick,along the old highway#11 which snaked it's way up the coast through some of the poorest and roughest country I've ever seen.The road was blacktop,but not good blacktop and driving about was rough.Many of the roads were dirt,or ,to be more accurate,mud.Travel even then was not nearly as smoothe as it is today.

We lived in a big box of a house located on the east side of the road.a few miles to the south was the military base where my father worked.And,a slightly longer distance to the north was another larger military base.In between was a line of mostly rundown houses and outbuildings,many of them unpainted and some of them covered in bare tar paper.I can't recall a house along that streach of road that didn't look worn and shabby.

Our house,as best as I can recall was better than most,and certainly bigger than most of the ones nearby.It was tall,white and had green trim,though it was badly in need of paint.In the rear was a barn,and a chicken coop.During the day chickens strutted about in the back part of the driveway,being too wary of passing cars to stray near the road.The barn was big and unpainted,and,to this day I have no idea what was kept in it,as my father was not a farmer.I recall the smell of hay and of animals coming from it's door,but that may be just an inference I'm drawing rather than an actual memory.

Inside the house was big.The ceilings were high and it always seemed cool.Even inside,the wind seemed to move about,never going away completely.On the main floor was a kitchen and a livingroom,both of which seemed huge to me.In truth,I don't recall a lot about the rooms in that house.None of the colours of the walls or any of the furniture.I only know that when we left,the furniture stayed behind.My mother used to make butter in those days,so that all I recall of the kitchen was that there were bottles of cream and small packages of yellow colouring in the refridgerator for that purpose.In the livingroom,heat came from out of the floor,near big window where I used to stand,or perhaps sit and watch the traffic roar by on highway eleven.

In those days I was less than three years old,and one of the things I was learning was to not go near the road.I don't recall that I had much attraction to the road,and I believe the cars passing freightened me enough so that I needed little convincing to stay well back in the driveway.So many time I recall being told not to go near the road.Everytime I was allowed outside,my mother would say it."Stay off the road."She kept close watch but there was also a little pen built of a couple of peices of fence,just outside the door.If she were going to leave us outside for any length of time,it was into the pen we went.She always called that the"cricket pen",though I am not certain why.My sister,at that time was a toddler and she never went outside the house without being penned up.

Traffic passing by was interesting.So many different cars and trucks,even military vechicles and log trucks.But by far the back part of the driveway was where all the most interesting things happened.Chasing the chickens occupied a good portion of my time,and,for a while some pigs would come to visit,or,more correctly,to root up our garden.They came from the farm just up the road,which was owned by a Mormon family with what seemed like dozens of kids.The pigs seemed safe enough.No one told me they were dangerous.My father would chase them with a shovel or throw rocks and they would run away,but they were never properly fenced in and kept coming back.If my father was unafraid of them,the same could not be said of one young girl who came to babysit us one day.I was out playing in the driveway when she came out of the house and herded me back inside.There were a half dozen or more large hogs nosing up the garden and I noticed that the largest of the lot was cut all along his back and bleeding.I suppose it was a fearsome looking sight,but I was never really afraid of the pigs.My life at that time seemed to take place either within the house,or in the dirt driveway,between the hogs and traffic.

Just to the south of us there was a mud road,going in an easterly direction from highway eleven.As far as I know we never went very far down that road,but everyday log trucks went down it and came back,piled high with logs.Not far down that road was a huge mud puddle that almost flooded out that road,and sometimes the trucks could not make it through.The puddle,I believe is the reason we never walked down that road.Nothing about that road was inviting at all.In fact,you could not walk around the puddle,nor even drive through it with a car.

Between us and that old logging road were our nearest neighbors.They lived in a trailer which was brown and white.It sat so that it's wide side was along the logging road.Of the people who lived there,I do not recall a lot.They were close friends with my parents and came over to our house a lot.They had a little girl about my age whom I played with in the field between our houses.As I recall.her name was Roxanne.Later,they moved to Newfoundland,and we went to visit them.By then they had more children.

Even though I have a very thin memory of the family living in that trailer,there was one incident I recall involving the woman who lived there.She had a husband too,but of him I have no memory at all.It was summer,and must have been close to the time we moved away to Moncton.All the snow was gone and the weather was neither hot nor cold but somewhere in between.We were out in the yard with a young woman who was babysitting us for the day when the woman who lived in the trailer appeared on her front step carrying a big cardboard box.She reached into the box and brough out a snowball which she threw in our direction.Then she threw another and another until all the snowballs were gone from the box.She must have made up the snowballs while there was still snow on the ground,then kept them in a freezer inside the trailer.Throwing snowballs seemed to give her pleasure,as she laughed and laughed,all the moreso because the days were now warm.From that I concluded that she liked the winter,and to this day,that is all that I know about that woman.

Down the road,towards Chatham was another farm,where the man who owned the pigs lived.He was,as I said,a Mormon with many children.At the time,I didn't know what a Mormon was,or what it had to do with the number of children.But some of his children always seemed to be at our place.Sometimes the boys would come up through the bushes to round up their pigs and chase them back home.And I'm certain that some of the older girls were around because they looked after us while both my parents were at work.Those girls were all plain looking and had long hair,though I don't recall that they dressed strangely at all.Most of the Mormons children were much older than myself and they all seemed very tall.I could never tell them one from the other,neither girls or boys.Occasionally we would wander down to their farm too,but I don't recall a lot about being there,except that their house seemed very crowded.There were people sleeping in the front room and always there was someone coming in or out.

When my mother worked,it was as a school teacher.She never went to teachers college,but there was a big shortage of teachers then,so you could teach without a special license.The school where she taught was just past where the Mormons lived,on the other side of the road.I was only there once and the building seemed very small,without much of a yard.It backed right up against some very dense bush and was very close to the road,like many of the buildings along that streach of road.There was a wood stove inside and a pile of wood alongside the building.That was the one constant reality of life in that part of the world.It was a world of wood and logs and dense forest.Any building of any size had wood stacked beside it or within it,and you didn't have to go very far to become lost in the woods.In most places the trees came right down to the road and a person could become quite confused as to where they were by stepping just a few yards into the bush.When I recall that school house I recall a rather primative looking world.