The sunlit stories to enjoy  

The pancakes and the butter

Having become, against my will, nearly an old gentleman, my childhood memories are becoming more and more distant. I am being told, I am being warned that perhaps soon I won't have anything else left but the memories, so I shall practice a little with you.I used to live in a little village amidst the great plain of  Manitoba. 

All around our islet of a village, as far as the eye could see, there were great fields of wheat and rye.

My father owned a general store which sold everything. It sold felt boots as well as tableware and food. There were big blocks of salt for the cows and huge sacks of flour for the farmers who made nearly all their bread by themselves.

I must say that when I was little, I loved to spend time with my grandfather much more than at my father’s store.My grandfather had a great garden, and it was he who got me interested in growing tomatoes and cucumbers.
I think he loved me very much, my grandfather, as he was very kind to me. Fridays were fasting days back then and knowing that I didn’t like fish, he would come to pick me up from school at noon to go eat pancakes at his place.

I also had other grandparents, who lived at a farm, four kilometers from my village. Nothing gave me as much pleasure as going on a trip across the plain to visit them. The plain is so flat that you could see the farm long before you arrived there. It made me impatient to see it and to have to wait so long in the car before arriving there. It was one of those farms that don't exist anymore. There were hens in the yard, and sometimes even some frightening turkeys. Cows and calves in the cattle-shed, two huge horses that my grandfather used for all kinds of work. There was one or two fat hogs that used to sleep in the shadow of their pigsty. I was afraid of them nearly as much as of the gigantic workhorses.

My grandmother made her own butter and her own bread, and there was nothing in the world as delicious as my grandmother’s fresh bread with butter and jam. When the men were doing the threshing with an enormous threshing machine, I was allowed to accompany my uncle who transported the threshed grain to the granary in a wagon pulled by the two horses. My grandmother would bring us plates covered with tea-cloth on which there were big sandwiches on her homemade bread with tomatoes from the garden. I had a right to eat with the men, and that made me really happy.

All of this is gone now, of course. The world has changed, my grandparents have been in heaven for a long time. And yet it's enough for me to catch a smell of a fresh bread or pancakes, and it stirs up all those images in my head and they return, full of sunshine, to give me a happy moment of nostalgia.

Daniel Lavoie