There was nothing. Try to get over the highroad if you could. It took a tow truck to get you out of the ruts.

Well, what I used to do, I fed the family off the gardens. I would market in Deer Lake and set up a highway sign here. A lot of people used to travel through here at that time, to go to Big Falls. It was a well-travelled highway. So anything that I had to sell, I'd put a sign up on the side of the road and sell it.

Most of the farmers were down on the byroads, but I had the main road to myself. So anything that I could grow, I could sell it.

I grew things for the early-market garden. Greens and rhubarb, lettuce - some things that I could sell early in the spring.

I grew a lot of strawberry rhubarb, sometimes three pounds to a stalk. It was huge. Colemans in Deer Lake used to take it. It was surprising how much you made.

We built a barn and we kept hens. We went into the hens five years after.

Potatoes and the rough crops were only for our own consumption. We didn't have it for sale.

And then I had the strawberries. They came when Rodney and Joy were big enough to go in the fields with me. They must have been ten or twelve, when I started with the strawberries.

Pansy, our first child, was six when we had two more right together. There were only fourteen months in the difference between Rodney and Joy. But there wasn't any school, not out this way. There was a school five miles inside. Pansy started school when she was seven. I taught her kindergarten and grade one and she just took her exams in the spring. By the time she was seven there was a school two miles in the road, so she went to grade two. But she had to walk the two miles. The year she took grade nine was the first year we got the buses.

I was born with this gift of sewing. I passed the genes on to my two daughters as well. I was born with it. I could take anything as a small child and cut a pattern out of it. When I was ten I made myself a Princess style coat. I would do sewing for my sisters.

I had an old treadle sewing machine that an aunt in Corner Brook gave me. I used to take in things from other people, like a coat or dress, rip it down and make clothes for their children. I would make a few dollars that way. As I go talking now, things like this come to mind.