MARYANNE: And they were healthy. You said that maybe you didn’t get enough calcium.

MRS D: Well, I didn’t because I had to… (A lot of unclear dialogue follows. It sounds as though the insufficient calcium affected the twins’ health.)

MARYANNE: I think you’ve answered pretty well all of our questions…

MRS D: I think the fact that we did a lot of running around on the farm, you know, with gardening and milking cows and raising chickens and all that stuff it helped us to keep healthy. Walking did a lot of good. So..

MARYANNE: And I think that good, clean, homegrown food…

MRS D: We didn’t buy anything.

MARYANNE: It was very healthy.

MRS D: We had everything on the farm. The only thing we bought was flour and, of course, we took wheat in and got it milled and brought our flour back. Flour and sugar and salt and stuff like that.

KAREN: So after, I just want to go back to the time after your first baby, you said you weren’t encouraged to stay in bed?

MRS D: No. Nobody ever did. When my mother had babies, she got up the next day and she’d scrub the floors and stuff like that.

MARYANNE: Was that here in Canada, your mother had her babies?

MRS D: No. Well she had her youngest baby here in Canada. Actually she had her youngest baby after we were married, in October. And our daughter was born in May the next year.

MARYANNE: Oh, your daughter has an aunt?

MRS D: Uncle. She had an uncle, he passed away though when he was… (unclear, an illness.)

MARYANNE: So he would have only been a couple years older than…

MRS D: Months. A few months. They were just like two peas in a pod. (Discussion about her mother’s last baby, Mrs D’s baby brother.)

MRS D: And she had him at home too.

MARYANNE: So then her mother probably would have gone to help her with that baby?

MRS D: Not her mother, but my grandma, her mother-in-law.

MARYANNE: Oh, that was the mother-in-law?

MRS D: Actually, I remember my mother having my second brother, and my third brother. I wasn’t there when she had the last one, but I know she had the last one at home. But I was just a child when she was having these other two. I remember the midwife coming and we were put into another room and mum had her babies.

KAREN: Did you hear goings on or was mum very brave about it? Quiet.

MRS D: I don’t remember too much noise. Only thing I remember them telling us was the crows brought the baby. (Laughs)

We ask about Mrs D’s mother-in-law.

MRS D: She lived to be ninety six years old. She had her own children by herself. One of my uncles was born out in the barn. And she came in with this… you know they used to wear all these long skirts? She came in carrying this baby in her apron. I didn’t see it because I wasn’t born yet at that time. But mum and dad were telling us about how Grandma had her baby out in the barn.

MARYANNE: I know my mother-in-law told me that it was the custom to wear all these skirts and aprons and I asked didn’t you ever notice that your mum was pregnant? She said, “You know they had so much on. We didn’t notice.”

MRS D: Yes. It was a lot of skirts and a lot of aprons over top.

KAREN: You were a hardy people.

MRS D: I often wonder what would happen nowadays if all our power was taken away, all our running water. What would happen? It would be a crazy place.

KAREN: When you were talking about frost on the bedclothes, I was thinking you know I get upset when the temperature drops a degree or two in the house.

MRS D: We’d leave the basin, we had a basin where we washed. If we left any water in it, it was solid in a nice mound, you know how ice freezes? Or on the stove in the kettle. Every morning that’s what we found.

MARYANNE: So your husband would get up and get the fire going?

MRS D: He got up and got the fire started and crawl back into bed. For a little while until it warmed up a little bit.