When We Left Rosenort

 When We Left Rosenort
     by Little Lithesome Longing Leigh

After the flood of 1950 put an end to dad’s cheese factory, and after he had managed the Rosenort co-op for a year, he scouted southern Manitoba towns for a new place to bring the family and raise it. He found a yard in the Village of Altona, purchased it and settled us (two adults, five kids) down there to start a new career.
     Our first home on that yard was a lovely cottage-style house with a covered front porch. The back of the house had attached to it a mirror image of the porch at the front. In this “lean to” lay my bedroom, under a low tin-covered roof. When it rained and thundered I felt peace and comfort, the storm sounds somehow acting like a warm quilt covering me. 
     At three years of age, or maybe four, I still knew very little of the world and knew that this place, this yard, this village was as good as any for me to live in. It didn’t take very long for me to make three friends, Norman, Ronald, and Lorna. Ronald lived with his mother and three siblings across the village street from my yard, Norman lived with his mother and five older brothers a half mile down the road at the end of the village. Lorna lived in a traditional Mennonite house and barn with both parents and a pile of mostly brothers on the yard immediately south of ours. Between our house and the neighbour to the north, the Stoezes (whose boy, David, attended public school one week only and then stayed home, protected from prying eyes), a large fruit garden grew apples and plums and it may have been that my father even tried to plant in it some blueberries.
     A railway track connected Altona with Gretna eight miles to the south and, as far as I knew, stretched into the United States, a few miles further south of Gretna. This railway  gave my friends and me a good alternative route for visiting each other because it went the length of the village, on the far side of the yards that lay along the west side of the gravel street. On the west side of the railroad track itself, a deep ditch filled with water each spring. Each spring we built a raft to pole along for as far as we could. The water measured about three feet deep at the deepest and it was a lucky day that I did not fill my boots. We did the things that all country boys living close to the railway tracks do. We placed pennies on the rail to see how big the train would make them stretch to.
     This village became my home until I grew old enough to leave my parents and strike out on my own. Many, many of my memories, the ones that concern me possibly more than any others, the ones that deal with what it was like to be a young boy, occurred in the time that I lived there. In my mid 70s now, when I am searching for a memory to record, it is still to the village of Altona that I first fly in my mind.