Lydia’s wedding comes together nicely, though the honeymoon has to be a short one, but soon she and Jack and Stephen are ensconced in their own home. The next problem is a sad one, and it’s all about children.
Links to previous chapters are at the end of this episode.

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I had to really scramble to get all my school work finished, call my family and get things ready for the wedding. Jack took me to meet his siblings who lived around here, and one sister offered to bake us a tiered wedding cake.

I had no money for a wedding dress and didn’t really want one anyway, so I went to a little store in town to see what they had. What luck! There was a two-piece white dress and coat, dressy enough for a wedding, and it was on sale. I bought it and managed to get into it, quite a feat. For $10, I was able to buy a skirt, top and jacket as a going-away outfit and I was all set. For a veil I found a white hat that suited the purpose and my trousseau was done.

I had to get all my school records finished and updated and the children’s test papers graded before the end of the school year. Jack helped me do the grading and couldn’t help laughing when one of the Grade 1 boys got the five health questions all mixed up. I had the Grade 1 class cut and paste the end of a sentence, letting them use the pasting time while I worked with another grade. This boy pasted every sentence wrong. So in the morning when he got up, he “polished his hair, brushed his face and put on clean teeth”. I can’t remember the other two, but to this day Jack always makes sure that before we go anywhere, we polish our hair and put on clean teeth.

A Grade 2 boy, when asked to name the four seasons, had “Moose season, partridge season, fishing season and hunting season” as his answers. I guess my teaching didn’t sink in with those two boys, but the rest did fine.

I next notified the priest about a July 1 wedding and ran into a problem. I was baptised into the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and I needed the permission of the Ukrainian Bishop in Toronto for the wedding to be performed by the local priest. With time short, he somehow managed to obtain the necessary paper and another weight was lifted from my shoulders.

Jack and I went to Kirkland Lake to get the marriage licence and ran into another obstacle: The clerk needed a religion for Jack, and because he didn’t have one we were told a licence couldn’t be issued. So, unofficially, Jack is Catholic, and the paper was signed and in our possession.

We had the church booked, my dress bought, licence in hand and permission granted. We were all set. But neither of us bothered to book a motel room, thinking we would find a room somewhere since we were only going a bit farther north. Big mistake! Jack had just been elected as a township councillor and took his new position very seriously. We got married on a Saturday, but had to be back before the Monday evening council meeting.
Jack also arranged for us to have the township hall for a dance and we asked one of our friends to call square dances and play in a small band.

There were several places around here that held Saturday night dances in empty one-room school houses, and I had been to a few with Kelly, even taking all the kids. It was just like in old pioneer movies. Everyone danced and then the kids curled up in a pile of coats when they got tired. Anyway, the wedding was to be in the early afternoon and the dance that night, so we had a few hours to change and visit with family. Mother came up by train, but Sister was again expecting, so she stayed home. She lost the baby shortly afterwards.

Jack’s brother came from London and we had a house full of relatives, as well as the new friends I’d made in town. The day was a haze to me and as a result, I forgot to look after an important event. I didn’t do anything to provide any refreshments at the dance, and other than those that brought a bottle, all we had was tap water. I still feel guilty about the oversight.

Here we are at the church: Jack’s mother, Jack, me and my mother, and in the front, Mary Ann and Stephen.

Stephen was all excited, both about the wedding and about seeing his grandmother. Jack got along with his new son and Stephen liked Jack, so I was quite pleased. I was honest with Jack and told him all about the circumstances of Stephen’s birth, and he never once wanted any details and never again discussed my previous life. What happened before we met didn’t matter to him. That made me so proud of knowing him and showed me how good he was as a person.

The church wedding went without a hitch. Jack’s childhood friend and his wife stood up for us, and their foster daughter, who was also in my Grade 1 class, was flower girl. We had a good time at the dance, where Jack’s nephews whirled me around so much I began to feel motion sick, and we decided to leave early so we could find a motel and I could lay down.
Stephen was his usual boisterous self and he fell off the outside steps, scraping his side quite badly, and Mother had to soothe him because we were getting ready to leave.

We drove about a hundred miles north without finding a vacancy, so we headed back to Kirkland Lake, where Jack knew of some shabby hotels that just might have a spare room. What a dump we ended up in! I’ve been in better hovels than that room, but I was too sick to care and slept with my head hanging over the side of the bed, so sick I threw up all night. Poor Jack.

Next day we drove to some relatives of his and after sightseeing, found a nice lodge on a lake to spend the night.

On Monday, we returned so Mother could get back to Hamilton and work, but Jack wouldn’t hear of her going by train, so we put her on an Air Canada flight and she had her first plane ride. After supper Jack had to go to his council meeting and Stephen and I went to see “My Fair Lady”, where friends kept asking me where Jack was, so soon after our wedding. And so we began our married life.

We still lived in that little house that I rented in town, but Jack – who had to work at his father’s sawmill – spent all day on his home farm so I didn’t see him until well after supper. Jack also helped his father farm the land and was busy every day. One day, about a week after the wedding, he announced that his father had agreed to give him some money to buy a house trailer that we could put on the farm and we would be living there. I liked that idea and Jack and I went to see about a trailer that was being sold all furnished. We now had our own home and soon we were installed behind the house on the farm.

Jack wanted to put a basement under the trailer, so he used his bulldozer to dig the hole and had the footing and floor in for the brick mason to lay the blocks. In the photo you can see the trailer in background.

The rent on our house in town was paid for until the end of July, so I had time to pack what I wanted to take with me and move at my leisure. My friend from Duke Street again came up, this time with both of her children, Michael and Marnie. She helped us move and the kids had fun playing around the farm. At that time we had no animals here, but there was a barn and sheds to explore and fields to run in. As soon as the basement walls were dry, Jack and his family rolled the trailer on the blocks and we had our permanent home.

I made arrangements with the school to have Stephen picked up by a bus in September and we settled into our cosy home. Jack’s brother lived on the next farm to ours and there were five children there, with one just a year younger than Stephen and one about three years older. Both played with Stephen, so he wasn’t lonely. We sold the furniture we didn’t need to the people renting the house and stored the rest in one of the sheds. I loved having a home of my own, not Mother’s and not rented.

With nothing much to do, I sent away for my Grade 13 history and English courses and started work towards getting my permanent teacher’s certificate.

Stephen started Grade 2, I did my own school work, while Jack worked on the farm. Life was good. We agreed that Jack would adopt Stephen and we started the process, which was very easy.

In November I started to have terrible pains in my abdomen and when I couldn’t stem my bleeding I had to be rushed to the town hospital. After a few days, I was told I had a “tubal” pregnancy and would need an operation before the fallopian tube ruptured. Oh, how I cried. I wanted another baby so badly, and here it was growing in the wrong place and had to be removed. I just couldn’t seem to do this pregnancy thing right.

While I was in the hospital, Stephen told everyone at school I had just had a baby boy, and a number of parents were counting backwards, wondering when I became pregnant. I only learned of this months later when someone wondered where the new baby was.
It took a while for me to get over that operation, but we had a nice Christmas that year, the first Jack had had away from his parents, and by January I was again myself. The doctors told me I could have a successful pregnancy with one tube, so I didn’t worry.

The moose hunters: Jack, Stephen and some friends.

There was a lot of snow that year and Jack had a snowmobile, so we took a lot of rides around the farm. Stephen loved going for rides, and when Jack was busy took his old baby sleigh and made trails all over our lawn.

Besides working on the farm, Jack also used to go to people’s homes to fix their televisions, and we used to go with him if we knew the people. That way we visited many of my friends and former students’ homes, and the isolation of living in the country wasn’t so bad.

I got very friendly with a family who lived at the airport where Jack kept his plane, and I would look after their three children whenever they went away. The oldest girl was in Stephen’s grade, the middle boy was three and the baby just a few months old. I loved having children, around and Jack didn’t mind them being with us. Stephen had his seventh birthday in ‘68 with children from his class as well as his new cousins.

My studies were becoming too much for me to handle, and when the person grading my papers began to criticise the way I wrote and what I used to write with, I just quit – again. With supply teachers scarce, the Public School Board approached me to do spare teaching, and that was all I wanted to do, rather than full-time. I would be called the night before, but many times I had to get ready that morning when some teacher became too ill to go in that day. I didn’t mind, and it gave me some extra money for things we needed.

Early that summer I was looking after the airport children when Stephen came in, complaining he’d had a bad dream. Since this was in the afternoon and he had been outside playing with the cousins, I didn’t know what he meant, when all at once he rushed to the bathroom and threw up. I checked his head and saw a scraped spot, but he didn’t know how it got there. The other kids were passing the house so I asked them what had happened, and was told he’d fallen while climbing the partition between the hay mow and the cattle area. We had no cattle, the ground was rock hard and on his way down, he also hit his head on the cross beams. So off to the hospital we all went.

X-rays showed his head was all right, but he’d fractured his arm and was put in a cast. We wouldn’t let him or the other children play in the barn again that summer. In August Mother called and said Sister wasn’t doing well with her fourth pregnancy and asked if I could take Jeff for a while. Of course I agreed, and we took a trip to Hamilton to pick him up.

Jeff had been a sickly child, spending his first birthday in the hospital, and at 16 months he still wasn’t walking and had just learned to crawl. I enjoyed having a baby in the house and even had the airport baby, a few months younger, stay as well. Stephen’s room was very crowded with his bed and two cribs, but everyone survived.

Here’s Jeff, Stephen and Pauline.

When Sister lost her baby, Mother came and took Jeff back, and I missed having a baby very much. That fall I again had abdomen pains and bleeding, and this time I was sent to Kirkland Lake to see a gynaecologist. Another tubal pregnancy was found and a hysterectomy was performed. Now I was crushed, knowing there would be no more children for me. All I could think of was that if Lonnie had had his way I would have lost Stephen, and now I would never have any other. I thanked God that I fought so hard to keep him. I wanted to adopt, but Jack wasn’t too keen on that idea at the time, so we just “borrowed” children. We registered at the foster children agency but hadn’t heard from the Children’s Aid Society yet.

One of Jack’s nieces was taking a beauty shop course, and her son Donald stayed with us for a few weeks while she was away.

Donald and Stephen got along well, and looked after the pet lamb that we got that spring. Bambi was one of triplets and the mother could only handle two, so we were given the extra one, which we kept in the house and fed with a bottle, as Donald is doing in the picture. Bambi became such a pet that when we bought a flock of sheep she wouldn’t live with them and wanted to come into the house, even when she was a grown sheep.

Seasons came and went. On my birthday Jack’s mother phoned to say she needed Jack right away. I found him, and a few minutes later he ran in to tell me to call the ambulance because his father collapsed. We called the family, but before the out-of-town ones could arrive he died, and we now had Jack’s elderly mother to watch over. It was lucky we lived across the driveway from her.

Continued here.

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Previous chapters: Part 1 @ Part 2 @ Part 3 @ Part 4 @ Part 5 @ Part 6 @ Part 7 @ Part 8 @ Part 9 @ Part 9