Pop 89: It takes a child to raise a village
By Madonna Hamel
When I announced to my urban friends that I'd moved to Saskatchewan, to the village of Val Marie, my mother's birthplace, a common response was: wow, you mean villages still exist? Then they'd go to Google Maps to see where the hell I am.
By definition, a village is a small, permanent human settlement typically defined by a population of 100 to 2,500 people, a rural location, and a cluster of homes near a central gathering point. Our central gathering points are Val Marie Grocery and Liquor and the Val Marie Hotel, where you can count on a classic Chinese Canadian supper every night and where you can find Patsy and the two Maurices playing cards over cups of weak prairie coffee.
In the early '70s, the British essayist and critic John Berger, author of "Ways of Seeing," moved to a small village in the French Alps, where he spent what turned out to be five decades of his life. "He wasn't seeking a refuge from the world, but the right kind of contact with the world," writes a film critic about a documentary about Berger. "The film overflows with his charm and energy as a friend and neighbour. There's none of the solitary artist pose. Peasants were a major reason he came; his son became one. And peasants became essential to his politics. When it was easy to misunderstand."
I laugh out loud. "Peasant? What era are we living in? How does one become a peasant?" The archaic word brings up images of ruddy bodies in Bruegel paintings and worker manifestos from the French Revolution.
But I also recall my mom talking about her life on the farm, just three km down the road from me.
"I was like a little peasant," she often laughed, "playing in the mud with piglets, my favourite farm animal."
As a child I imagined myself living in villages like the kind my mother would set up on the mantlepiece, complete with miniature churches glowing stained glass patterns on cotton batting snow. I loved model train sets with ye olde shoppes dotting the railway tracks, with villagers waving to the world as they passed by in their Currier and Ives sleighs, wearing capes trimmed in ermine.
In university I read Henry David Thoreau's dedications to rural living. "The respectable folks — where dwell they?" he wrote. "They whisper in the oaks, and they sigh in the hay; summer and winter, night and day, out on the meadow, there dwell they. They never die, nor snivel, nor cry, nor ask our pity with a wet eye. A sound estate they ever mend, to every asker readily lend; to the ocean wealth, to the meadow health, to Time his length, to the rocks strength, to the stars light, to the weary night, to the busy day, to the idle play; and so their good cheer never ends, for all are their debtors, and all their friends."
I can't say my neighbours and fellow villagers are cheery salt o' the earth peasants. But I can say I made a deliberate choice. I chose to live here with every hope that life would be simple, choices would be obvious, and nature would direct my day: waking, walking, writing, sleeping. I am available for volunteer duty at bonspiel, rodeo and hockey tourney.
My friends warned me that I would become a source of gossip and speculation. Things would be expected of me. How they knew this I don't know, until I realized that they were speaking about their own lives, just on a different scale, surrounded by different expectations. They worked in their own villages, in offices, universities, shops and institutions.
They also ask: so, does it still take a village to raise a child? "Actually," I reply, "I've come to the conclusion that it's the other way around. It takes a child to raise a village."
My first Sunday in Val Marie was Pentecost Sunday. I made a point of going to mass, where I was introduced to the Andree family. The girls were altar girls, attending to our aging German priest Fr. Joe, preparing for communion and even kicking his chair if he should nod off after delivering his homily.
The Andrees were not unlike most young folks round here. Raised to be well-mannered and with a prodigious patience when it comes to the long-winded life stories of older folks like me. But most remarkable of all, the Andree kids, unlike the grown men in the village, their father among them, whose f-bombing never ends, whether it's the f'n government or a broken down f'n truck, never cuss. How they manage to keep it clean, I don't know.
Last week, leaving the Swift Current Mall, I encountered a young pregnant woman. The bump in her belly brought a familiar twinge of inescapable longing, forcing me again to face the fact I never had a kid and will never have one. I will never experience gestation, the pain of giving birth, the miracle of motherhood.
Still, I am as happy for her, this young stranger, as I am excited when I learn about a village pregnancy. A new baby in Val Marie is the news of the year. We need new blood, the infusion of life energy, we need character, our lives altered. We welcome future day care workers, waitresses, cowboys, general store clerks, bus drivers, EMRs. So, thanks, in advance, for taking care of us, young'uns. Thanks for carrying those 15L jugs of water to my car, for having manners, for showing respect, for modelling good behaviour for the rest of us, forcing us to be respectable folk.
The children and youth of my village raised me in these later years. Over my 14 years here, working alongside the teens of Val Marie, flipping burgers at the bonspiel and the rodeo, learning to dance the two-step at weddings, I hope the new arrivals in our village will grow to see their part in everyone's maturation, the f-bombing grumpy old men as well as the self-isolating blow-ins, because we need them not only to survive, but to thrive.