Prompt #5 - My Childhood Home

My Childhood Home I lived in the same house on the same farm for the first seventeen years of my life, until the day I left home to go to university. And I never lived with my parents ever again after that. I loved living on a farm even though I was not the typical outdoors type of person. My father and brothers did what few barn chores there were and my mother did all the gardening and lawn care, so my responsibility was pretty much just my schoolwork. But I loved walking out into the pasture or across the fields or walking or biking down the roads and over to the nearest neighbours which, for the first ten years, was where the twins lived, Linda and Leila, and after that, my cousins, four boys all younger than me. The pasture was a magical place of grass, low box-like shrubs, and scrub bush, mostly Manitoba maple and poplar, with willow in the lower sections surrounding the sloughs (rhymes with “clues”) which are places where rainwater and runoff water collect, mostly in spring, and which have usually evaporated before the end of summer. If the water did not evaporate, then it would have been called a lake. The farm was on the Parklands of Manitoba, three quarter sections around the home place, most of it “broken” meaning under cultivation, planted in wheat, oats, barley, or flax, with clumps of bush around the farmstead and along the fencelines.