Part Ten: Summing Up

Saskatoon was no Berlin, but it had movie houses and streetcars and blocks that other kids lived on who could be your friends. It had schools and department stores, jobs and running water (well, some houses had running water!). It had electricity! Excitement! And hope

It was an urban space. It might have been (probably was) quite a few years behind New York and London, but it was half a century on from Livelong and Turtle Lake. The family was moving on in space and time, but that decade on the farm would leave its mark on all the participants, in their stoicism, persistence, and their resistance to adversity, in their survival skills, in their willingness to go along with life and enjoy it, no matter what it brought them. It was a life of hardship needing to be endured, but enlivened with laughter and learning and huge dollops of common sense and practicality.