Growing Up In The Country

I grew up in a little town in Quebec that bordered Vermont. I was of course in the country surrounded by mountains. It is a beautiful area that lots of tourists still come to, especially in the fall when the leaver are changing. I guess when I was growing up I never really thought of it all as breathtaking but it truly is. I think as you get older you realize and appreciate things more than you do when you are a young kid.

I was the youngest of 6 kids and we had a huge garden, chickens, pigs and if that wasn't enough my father started a sawmill when I was 3 years old. It wasn't intended to become a business, it was actually to save money when he had to build another barn to house the pigs. It just goes to show you just never know in life how things will turn out. He ran that mill for years and I grew up in "the business".

I remember as a young child having to go and clean up the sawdust from around the pulleys and feeding the calves during the summer months when I wasn't in school. We all had our chores to do but because of the age differences of all of my siblings by the time I was in high school they were all married with children or had moved away. Every summer, I remember going with my aunt and uncle to pick strawberries at a local farm and bringing them home and preparing them all to freeze. My mother helped doing that but she was sick most of my life so she couldn't do a lot.

For some reason, math was an easy subject for me...yes, I am a geek! LOL and I ended up as I was in High School doing the invoices etc for the sawmill. It wasn't easy being a girl  in a "man's world" but it didn't take me long to prove that I knew a lil about wood and how things work!  I kept doing the paperwork and dealing with clients mostly during the summer and it was a great clientele, mostly locals that were building or that had repairs to do, so lots of people were getting used to the "girl" being in the yard! Time passed and my mother was getting worse so I tended to her and ran the business along side my father. After my mother passed away, my life changed as you can imagine! I was with her everyday and it shook my world up to say the least. I threw myself into the sawmill and worked more and more with my father who obviously was doing the same thing I was....after all, they had been married 48 years! A year and a half to the date my mother passed away we lost our father. He had been sick that winter and in and out of the hospital. I brought him home to take care of him and with the help of  my siblings he stayed at home til the day before  he passed away. We all knew they were together again!

I ended up running the mill by myself with 2 employees, hard it was! I had never been on the lift before, that was my father's job! It was amazing to see the outpour of the community and the people behind me as I took what was once my father's and started it by myself, those clients that saw me as a lil kid in the sawdust now saw me loading it in peoples trucks and working in the mill along with of course doing all of the paperwork. It was very hard work and long hours. I was taught so much by my parents and although they are gone and I am now happily married and in the  US. I know they are smiling down on us all and glad that we are all happy and living the lives we want to live.