Rural Life Together

Rural Life Together by Dave Margoshes

This article is a response to dee Hobsbawn-Smith Chalk and Cheese

I was born in New Jersey and spent the first six years of my life in an old farmhouse near Princeton while World War 2 raged on in Europe and Asia. When I say “old farmhouse,” I mean old. The date 1773 was etched in the mantle above the front door; George Washington was reputed to have spent the night there before the Battle of Princeton, a small but important victory for the American Colonials against the British in 1777. It was a new house when George slept there, but an old one when it was my time.

The house was wooden, with no insulation, two stories with a creaky staircase. There was no electricity (my older sisters did their homework by the light of kerosene lanterns), and no heat other than a wood-burning stove in the kitchen. A pump just outside the kitchen door and an outhouse made up for the lack of plumbing.

In the winter, at bedtime, my dad put good-sized stones or bricks in the stove, one at a time, took them out with pinchers, wrapped each one in a towel and took them upstairs. I remember the comforting warmth of that makeshift heating unit under the pile of covers at the foot of my bed. In the morning, the stone would still be warm.

I loved it on the farm. We had a dog, Brownie, a house cat we called Mouser and a bunch of feral cats in the rickety old barn. There was plenty of room for me and Brownie to wander and play. There was a pond where, starting around 5, I learned to fish with the help of an older neighbour boy.

When I was 6, our family moved to a city, so my sisters could go to college, and thus ended what I like to think of as my idyllic farm-boy childhood. After that, except for a brief period in a small Colorado village, my life was spent in cities and towns, a thoroughly urban life. So, it’s more than a little ironic that, for the last 15 years, I’ve been once again living in an old farmhouse, this one about a 20-minute drive west of Saskatoon. And at my age, it’s likely to be the last house I live in, which suits me fine.

My partner, dee, and I moved into this old house when her parents retired from farming and moved to a cozy bungalow in nearby Langham. The farm and the house were already over a hundred years old; dee’s grandparents bought it in 1946.  At that time, the house – which according to family legend began as two grain bins bolted together – had just three rooms, a large kitchen, and two small bedrooms, since converted to living room and bathroom. When dee’s mother was growing up here, it had no electricity or plumbing, with a privy out back – not that different from my farmhouse of old.

Soon after dee’s family moved in, her dad started adding rooms, including two bedrooms and the large open second floor.

It’s not nearly as “old farmhouse” as my first one, but it’s still pretty rustic. We spent quite a bit on it, converting from a combination oil-and-wood furnace to natural gas and many other improvements. Our friends think it’s charming, but they don’t see its flaws in the sharp light that we do. It’s a bit creaky (as am I) and eccentric (again), but it suits us to a T. My office is in a corner of a glass-enclosed sunroom on the main floor which doubles as dining room, dee has as hers the entire top floor, writing at one end, sewing and quilting at the other.

We started talking about being a “writing couple” soon after we got together. I remember a conversation we had while on a walk at the Emma Lake artists/writers’ colony in the summer of, I think, 2009. We were a relatively new couple then, hadn’t yet moved in together, and we both wondered how we’d fare – would our artists’ egos bump against each other? There were a few examples in the Saskatoon area we knew of: writer Guy Vanderhaeghe and his then-wife, Margeret, a painter; and David Carpenter (writer) and spouse Honor Kever (painter) came quickly to mind, both solid relationships as far as we knew. We were also reminded of the poet couple Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier, whose relationship was famously chaotic but enduring.

Mention of Pat and Lorna brought to mind their collaborative book, No Longer Two People, written fairly early in their relationship. We talked about trying our hand at a collaboration that day – it’s taken almost 15 years for that idea to come to fruition: starting on January 1 this year we began trading poems back and forth, each riffing off the previous. The manuscript, still accumulating, tends to take its cues from what we see outside the windows of our old house, the gardens, fields, trees, birds (lot of birds) and other wildlife (deer, coyotes, porcupines), with the weather occupying a large part of the territory. The house itself steps up for a featured role in a few of the poems, as does the celebrated flood of 2011, which had us living on a virtual island for over a year until our washed-out driveway was rebuilt as a causeway.

We’re both professional writers and spend the better part of most days at our desks, seeing each other just at mealtimes and in the evening. We’re both each other’s first reader and editor and if there’s ever been a time when one ego butted against the other, I can’t recall it.

Living in the country, it’s good that dee and I are each other’s best friends because we often see no one else for days on end. I don’t think either of us are particularly bothered by the isolation but when we do get antsy, Saskatoon is a short drive away.

I’m not a runner, as dee is, but I value my afternoon walk with our dog Jake. Out under the vast prairie sky, I feel completely at home, and it’s where I do some of my best writing. I love it here.

Dave Margoshes is a Saskatoon-area writer. He’s appeared six times in Best Canadian Stories and been a Journey Prize finalist. He’s published some twenty books, including six volumes of poetry; the most recent, A Calendar of Reckoning, appeared in 2018. His previous poetry title, Dimensions of an Orchard, won the 2010 Saskatchewan Book Awards Poetry Prize. He’s taught creative writing and led workshops at various locations, and for various age groups. He was writer in residence in Saskatoon in 2001-02 and Winnipeg in 1995-96. For several years, he was involved with Writers in Electronic Residence (WIER), which linked professional writers with high school students via the Internet.

His poetry leans toward the narrative, with an emphasis on detail and concrete imagery. He values precision of language, emotional content and clarity above all else.

Rural Artists Working Group (RAWG) – The Saskatchewan Arts Alliance, along with rural artists, are working on the creation of a Rural Artists Working Group (RAWG). This group will tackle issues around isolation, professional development, and connecting provincial artists and arts communities of all disciplines. If you are interested in participating, please contact info@saskartsalliance.ca.