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My childhood home was a happy one with five children, Beverley, Aubrey Ronald, Jay, Dennis, myself and parents Myra and Reuben Thelin. We lived on a farm in Orton, Alberta, Canada in the middle of the southern Alberta prairie. Everyone worked very hard. Life on the homestead was not easy. There was always hard work to be done in a farm atmosphere. Chickens, pigs, sheep and turkeys needed to be fed. Cows were to be milked morning and night.
Crops needed to be planted, harvested and then planted and harvested year after year. Too many a spring saw the wheat or barley crop flattened to the ground by an insidious hailstorm buffeting the fields. We had no running water until I was three years old and washed laundry with an old wringer washer .

We heated our small three room farmhouse with a large pot-belly coal stove in the living room/master bedroom. The wood-burning stove in the kitchen was always lit, making home-made bread, cooking large amounts of food for the threshers during harvest time. The stove heated water on Saturday night for the metal bathtub. The youngest of five bathed first. Mother and father bathed last. I always wondered how my father ever got clean!!!

One of my fond memories was during a late spring snow storm a baby lamb was born. My father tenderly carried the lamb into the house. He filled a glass pop bottle with warm milk, attached a big nipple and I was given the opportunity of feeding the baby lamb. Then as the fire in the stove died down the lamb had a warm place in a basket on the open door of the stove.

A small bedroom added on after the house was built was where I slept. In the winter the wind blew the snow under the window sill into the room during furious blizzards. Because of the cold I slept under many heavy quilts and my head underneath to keep warm.