Huron County

A Beginning – Living in Huron county

By Jim ⋅ September 6, 2007 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

An Adventure

I was quite pleased
when Sam Mooney asked me to contribute to this blog – partly because I am presently “living in the country”, partly because Ilove it , and partly because I enjoy writing.

There are beautiful places all across Canada, this fantastic nation of ours, but as the old saying goes…”there’s no place like home”. These counties- Bruce, Huron and Grey- have everything in my opinion…from professional theatre and music, to great cultural events, progressive agriculture (lots of organic farmers around here), and a whole list too long to go into right now. Everything is within a reasonable driving distance and if you’re careful, the cost of living is reasonable too.

But it’s agriculture that forms the foundation of life in these counties and affects just about everything that happens here. I am convinced that when it comes to “salt of the earth”, farmers rock.

Farming is in my genes and blood and heart.

I was born on one of those old-fashioned, hundred-acre mixed farms and grew up in a big old white farmhouse on the edge of a little village called Dungannon in North Huron.

Now, I’m old enough to remember the big draft horses my father used to work the farm and the long winters, when weeks of daily snowfall would block all the roads for days at a time. Those were the times we thanked God that we lived so close to the village.

Growing up on a farm has made me pretty conscious of the air, earth, water and sunlight around us; and I still get excited about planting a seed and watching the magic of germination and growth.

There’s been a bit of a drought this summer in the area but fortunately it hasn’t been bad enough to destroy crops; however, it has not been good for pasture, although I haven’t heard of any animals dying of thirst like they do in some places and our rivers are still running nicely.
But then I remember as a kid, there were summers when we had too much rain and crops rotted in the fields and some people got flooded out. Those were times
when we prayed in vain for relief from Heaven.

But then over the years things change and I can see that the climate is changing too.

This isn’t a soapbox though and it’s not an autobiography either…just a few lines to get us all started on what promises to be a leisurely ride through the past and
present of a great part of Canada.