Harbingers Of A Canadian Spring

Writing assignment by Marion Lien, April 5, 1994

Uncle Jack wasn't really my Uncle Jack, although at age four the ambiguities of relationships didn't enter my mind. Aunt Tilda was my aunt, and through her marriage to my real Uncle Jack the other Uncle Jack somehow fitted into the family fold.

My vague memory of him is of a skinny man with an intriguing, hoppity, somewhat lurching way of walking. It wasn't the same unsteady, zig-zagging gait which my grandfather's hired man sometime had when he was försupen, whatever that meant (the English word is "drunk"), and his breath didn't have powerful dragon fumes to make me almost choke if I came too close to him.

Uncle Jack wore only one shoe. Until I saw him walking one day, I had never noticed that adults have sticks instead of feet. I wondered rather absently if it would hurt when my own toes fell off when I grew up to be an old lady.

It was my mother who told me the rest of the story years later after we had moved from the Saskatchewan prairies to the States. I don't myself remember getting into trouble on the day Mother told me about when I took off one of my own shoes and followed Uncle Jack in an earnest attempt to emulate his admirable walking style. It was spellbinding to see that when his peg leg sometimes sank a bit into a soft spot where the early spring ground was thawing, his foot with the shoe would shoot forward while his bony bottom pointed backwards as he tried to keep his balance. When I attempted that trick on my own stubby legs I stumbled and fell, only to be surprised by a resounding smack on my spanking place.

"Skam på dig, du odigdig flicka," my grandfather roared. "Vet du inte att det är stygg att förlöjliga äldre personer?" (Shame on you, you naughty girl. Don't you know that it is wicked to make fun of older people?")

This was only one in a long series of life's puzzlements as I kept trying to understand the complexities of the adult world. Why was it wicked to try to be like someone as fascinating as Uncle Jack with his wispy white hair blowing in the wind and his cheerful whistle?

As was the custom of the homesteaders of those times in the early 1900's where the shelters they built to house themselves had no running water, cleanliness was not next to godliness but was second to practicality. The long, itchy underwear and hand-knitted woolen socks the men wore like a second skin during the freezing months of a Canadian winter became noticeably gamy by early April. It was commonly accepted knowledge that to change underwear before the warm spring weather came would surely lead to dreaded double pneumonia which was often fatal or to a debilitating seige of the ague which left one with painfully swollen joints.

A day came in late April when Uncle Jack, who was a bachelor, filled the copper washing boiler with reasonably clean water from a nearby slough. He rested it firmly upon the two flat rocks outdoors which served as a washstand. After adding shavings from a slab of potent yellow soap made from wood ashes and lye, he dumped his underwear into the water to soften its stiffness. Singing an Irish ditty to establish a lively rhythm, he then swished his clothes back and forth with the handle of a pitchfork until his underpants had changed to a lighter color. Lacking a clothesline, which he deemed unnecessary since he seldom washed clothes, he tied the arms of his long johns onto the lower limb of a scrub oak to dry in the sunshine.

Giving a sigh of satisfaction for a chore accomplished, he sat on the wooden stoop in front of his shanty. Wrapped in his winter jacket while enjoying the sunshine and his pipe, he watched with amusement the legs of his underwear being whipped into a wild, frenzied dance by the strong, blustery winds.

He thought he had closed his eyes for just a moment, but while he dozed one dancing leg had become entangled in a twig from the tree branch, forming along with the dropseat of the long johns a small tunnel. When he awakened he was astonished to see that a pair of brown and gray rough-winged swallows were busily carrying mud pellets from the spilled wash water into the sheltering tunnel of the dropseat. To this the birds soon added dried grasses as a lining to the nesting base with the apparent intent of settling in for the summer.

"Well I'll be a hornswoggled dipsy diddler," said Uncle Jack.

Nothing usable was ever discarded during those times, so from a neighboring homesteader a scant three kilometers away he borrowed the underwear of the old grandfather who had died during the harsh winter, thus avoiding the perils of pneumonia and the ague.

In peace and seclusion during the following weeks the swallows raised the five fledglings which had hatched from their clutch of white eggs.

Most of the emigres who settled in that particular section of the Saskatchewan prairies during the years when land was free for the taking came from Sweden, with a few Scotsmen, Englishmen and Irishmen scattered here and there among them. Since they lived long distances from other habitation, by necessity they managed to get along well in spite of their diverse customs, languages and religions. In order to survive it was imperative that they share with each other whatever expertise each one possessed. Thus it was that my grandfather, whose self-taught skills included blacksmithing and leather work as well as farming and the raising of horses, was often in demand. He cured and tanned the hides of horses and cattle into leather for shoes, harnesses, gun holsters and the like. He was also the lay preacher for an as yet unestablished Lutheran church which met in the farmers' homes.

I was never told how Uncle Jack had lost his leg before I was born. There were no prostheses available in homestead territory in the early 1900's, so it was to my grandfather he came when the wound from the amputation was sufficiently healed. My grandfather ingeniously fashioned a leather casing which both enclosed the stump of the leg and furnished a firm support for the peg leg. Trees were scarce on the prairies, but there were always willow trees along a creek. It was a carefully chosen, strong willow sapling which my grandfather used each fall to attach to Uncle Jack's stump as the previous one began to show wear.

Uncle Jack with his impish sense of humor enjoyed being a harbinger of spring. Since willows have their own characteristics, early in each spring season Uncle Jack's willow sapling leg began to grow new leaves. It was then that the laughing word would travel from farmer to farmer, "Time to ready the ground for planting. Irish Jack is sprouting again."