I Know My Onions

"My parents and my three older sisters were already in the Model T Ford. I think it was old because it had no top. It was moving day. My dad had filed on a homestead and we were about to begin the two-hundred-mile trek from Watrous to Carrot River, Saskatchewan. My powder blue dress was scattered with tiny pink flowers. Mother had fashioned it from pieces that had once been part of a dress she had worn. To me, the move mattered not at all. The usual aura of family security prevailed. How could a child of barely five years know the hardships that lay ahead?"

Ileen (née Sheehan) Boechler?s plainspoken memoir of a childhood spent homesteading beyond the 53rd parallel tugs at the roots of northern life, peeling back the layers of family and community connections to reveal the growth that is possible because of them.