By mail we rented the Merrill farm at Airdire, Alta., and prepared for the big move. Louis simplified it by selling everything we owned but our clothes, bed clothing, pictures and personal things and dishes. We had a $4000 sale January 7, 1927 and saw the favorite stock, farming tools and furniture sold, which we had chosen because we had liked them. My cousin Elva Potter and her husband were at the train, when we passed through Avon from Macomb, headed for Canada.
They had seen reports of a Chinook that had been blowing across Alberta for several days, so expressed their farewells thus: “Goodbye and good luck. You are going to have a wonderful experience. IT’S WARM IN CANADA NOW!” Their tones and laughing faces made us wonder whether they wished they could go too, but decided otherwise.
Our four days on the train were comfortable. The train was quite full and across from us was a father and mother with five children who had been home to “Nord Dakoty” and were returning to their home near “Mooshzhaw”. Our four children caught something from their five, bad colds, and about a week after we arrived at my parents’ home Louis contracted influenza, but we were lucky in that it didn’t spread to the children or me.
The quiet home on the prairie was enlivened by four preschool children, who couldn’t get out of doors because of the cold weather, but we managed to live through until spring, when they could go into the yard.
Louis has already covered the time from 1927 to 1946 when he was discharged from the Canadian army. He took a two year job with a casual furniture manufacturing firm in Calgary and sometimes drove, but as George was ready for his second 12th grade, Louis and he batched in alight housekeeping room most of the time for that year and the following one, when George worked as maintenance man for the R.C.M.P. cars in their garage. They came to Airdrie on weekends, so I had a husband part of the time, after going it alone for the 6 1/2 years of his army service.
Next: The Milk & Honey Business