my mother and she wouldn’t see Rita and Ruby. That would be awful. So we came home and we never went back.

You know, that time of the year, transportation was poor here. I can’t think how we crossed from Pictou to Georgetown, but anyway we crossed to Georgetown and then we hired a man to take us from Georgetown to Montague. And then from Montague out to my sister Katie’ s on the Whim Road.

Yes, then we came back to Flat River. [Had to start] pretty near from

scratch. It all looked pretty nice anyway.

Morning

Monday morning, when I would come down from my bedroom, I’d sit at the oven door and wash the baby with warm water, heated, while my husband was out at the barn doing the chores. When he came in, the baby was fed and we had our breakfast.

I had to heat the water, you know, and then gather the clothes. I’d go from one room to the other and gather all the dirty clothes and take them all down and, believe me, there was a pile of them.

[The water was] in an open well. We had a pump. And I’d heat that water and wash all those clothes. They ’d be on the fence from one end of the farm to the other. I don’t know how I ever done it. I don’t know how I ever done it with all those children [1 1]. They had such dirty clothes.

We ironed them with a heated iron. [It took] a lot of heat. And a lot of work in keeping the iron clean, you know, so the starch wouldn’t stick to it. We had starch and if we didn’t have any starch we’d make a thin flour, like a thin flour porridge. Oh, many a time we used that, just thickened a little flour — starch.

A big job was making the butter. That was one of the many morning jobs, one of the many morning dirty jobs, you know, because we had to use so much water. Messy. Yes, we always made the butter Monday morning. It would take a while according to the temperature of the cream.

[I’d set bread] twice a week. Perhaps five single loaves you know. Boil the hops and make the yeast. Set the bread at night. Cover it with a blanket to keep it warm. [Then, in the morning] you took it out and you kneaded it a while and then put it in the pans.

We always had to make soap. And we had the grease cold, hard as ever we could get it you know. And then we’d have the lye about the same temperature. When they were both about the same temperature, you’d stir

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