Remembering Family Times

The one thing I remember most about my family - there are lots of us. In my immediate family, I have four sisters and two brothers (I lost one to a car accident 20 some years ago). These sisters and brothers all have families and we are scattered all about. I really don't know how that happened, as we were quite close growing up.

Sundays were the best days! After church, we'd often go visiting, especially in the summer. I remember going to Grandma and Grandpa Wiebe's in La Crete. Actually they lived in the country. They had animals: chickens, cows, and horses mostly. Grandma had a huge garden with all sorts of savory and sweet smelling plants. The cousins and brothers and sisters would play hide and seek in the garden until Grandma would call out the window for us to pick the weeds while we were in there. Well, we couldn't see any weeds, at least we didn't recognize any, so off we'd go to bug Grandpa. He'd take us for a ride in his buckboard behind the horse. They did have a car, but we loved to pretend we were in the wild west and Grandpa was only happy to go there with us too. In the winter, when we'd visit, Grandma would cook us pots of homemade soup and pile the chicken feet on a big plate on the table. I never did try them, but my uncles loved teasing us by chewing on a chicken foot in front of us. Grandma's homemade noodle soup and sauerkraut soup were the best. I've tried copying the recipe several times and I just can't get it right. Perhaps my pot is too small. :-)

Yes, visiting my mom's side of the family was always a big production. First of all, you need to imagine several families with at least 6 kids each all crowding around a hall sized kitchen table with benches all around. Then the smells of the wood cookstove in the manufacture of all sorts of homemade goodies, from bread to boiled chickens and desserts of all kinds. It didn't matter which house you went to in La Crete; if you were related to the Wiebe family, the crowds were relatively the same.

After the meal, the women would clean up and the men would go into the living room to smoke and talk about the farming, trucking, saw mills, etc. whatever industry they were in at the time. The kids would bring out the puzzles and games and toys and have contests with each other. Someone would bring out a guitar, a fiddle, or mouth organs and the singing would start. Wow! The noise of it all! The beautiful noise of it all.