The food was always good. Now, you know, as I look back on it, these women did a sort of a fantastic job of cooking. Now, Mother made - there was seven of us eating there - fresh bread, 10 or 12 loaves; fresh biscuits; pies. When my mother was in the hospital in 1973..., we talked about old times. She told me that at one stage over a period of years, she baked by hand one hundred pounds of flour every 10 days to feed everybody. We killed a pork and a beef in the fall, whenever the weather got cold, just so it would be automatically refrigerated. We had those all winter to eat. And then, when the weather got warm, whatever was left of them would be cut up and pickled. We'd put it in salt brine. Then the butcher, by this time, started coming around to the doors; he was buying meat. And there was several men would buy fish. Sometimes a neighbour would drop in and chat, probably come to visit about five o'clock in the evening at the end of a day that there wasn't too much work done. And they'd stay two or three hours and take off. As I recall it, they talked about the same things they talked about last week, and they'd come again in a couple of weeks and talk about the same things and the same people. They mostly sort of reviewed old times. It seemed to give them a lift to talk about accomplishments of the older people that weren't even before them. Those would be, probably, the first or second generation after the Selkirk settlers. Margaret MacLeod Ross [My grandmother] was sort of a queen around the place; she had a lot to say. She saw the place hewn out of a hole in the woods. And she had a lot of history, much of which I've forgotten or that I never heard. But I remember things like her going to school in the morning and getting married in the afternoon. I remember her talking about when they decided to build a house -1 don't even know where the first one was -but they built a house in the area where the present home is. And she carried water for years from a spring on the next farm. It was three-quarters of a mile, and she used to carry a bar across her shoulders, hewn out of wood and rounded off to fit her particular shoulders, with a bucket on each end. Most of the washing water, of course, came from rain, and she carried water for cooking and drinking and certain things. She was a tiny, very tiny, small, little woman. I have an idea she might have weighed 75 pounds. She was part of the fixture in the house there but, rather than doing things around the house, she was always shearing and washing wool. There was animals butchered at the place from time to time Donald Ross 89