Growing up Country

I grew up on a 10-acre corn farm that was single-handedly transformed by my father into a dense forest of pine trees. He planted so many trees because he was bored having moved from the hustle bustle of the Oshawa suburbs to the sprawling Whitby countryside.

We lived sandwiched between a strawberry farm to the south and cow corn grow-op to the north. Behind our house lay a forest to be explored and behind that, a field of tomatoes, hot peppers, and enormous eggplants to be picked and offered up to our parents. We were stumped when they accused us of eating our neighbor’s strawberries. Looking shamefully down at our berry stained shirts and pink fingertips we had no idea how they had guessed—it was as if they had been spying on us.

This was all really cool until puberty. I rode a yellow school bus until I was 19! My parents weren’t the type of people that understood living in the country meant your children needed a vehicle to get around. My friends were therefore chosen based on proximity. One lived 2km north of my house and I was forced to jog to her place for visits. I’d get to her home, red faced and panting, begging her for a drink. Her family always had at least 10 dogs at a time and no one ever trained them not to poop inside. Walking from her front door to the kitchen to get water was equivalent to tiptoeing around a field of land mines. I would almost always leave with feces on my shoes cursing the fact that I didn’t have a car and therefore couldn’t choose my friends.

Another friend of mine, Meghan had a pool. Her house was too far to run to so my mom would let me borrow her bike and helmet and I would set out on my adventure, bathing suit in knapsack on my back. She and I got along very well. The one major obstacle to our friendship was her older brother who hated us for being “rockers.” He would sit in the dark living room all weekend long watching rap videos with his large gold dollar sign chain hanging from his skinny neck. When I finally got breasts he spent commercial breaks coming out to the pool to stare, unashamedly at them. Part of me was proud of my new assets and part of me hated him. He was obviously just my type and became one of my first crushes.