Vickers Heights

At about four, one of my first memories was arriving at a farm up in Vickers Heights. We'd been taken there to live with the Brown's, a farm family that raised us like any other paying farm venture. We'd been in the hands of the CAS while my parents legally separated.

A couple men dug a hole for a post that a teeter totter board with handles that could also be pushed around in a circle was spiked to. We would have lots to do. The entourage of officials was suitably impressed and were gone forever.

It felt good to be out of the orphanage and now in the countryside with a farmhouse and chickens, pigs and fields, a small farm on a gravel road between the Kaministiquia River and Old Fort William's Mount McKay, .

Vickers Heights was subject to temperature inversions and it was hot up there. During the long days of teetering or pushing endlessly, Mrs Brown would come out and yell. We'd race to the back porch where she would be holding out a single glass of ice cold Kool-Aid which went to the winner.

I won rarely, Lorne my older brother by 11 months would win almost every time, Donald 18 months younger than me never won. We weren't allowed to share.

I plead with Lorne to let Donnie win and he would agree time after time, I understood how my little brother felt and how thirsty he was, in that end of the farmyard, beside the shed, in front of the chicken yard bouncing and pushing on that board endlessly in the hot summer sun.

Once I forgot and raced up and took the Kool-Aid. Then I remember feigning to fall and trying to trip Lorne as he passed, but older brother always kept running for the drink, using my 'not trying' to win. Donnie and I could do nothing but watch him gulp down that cold liquid in the blessed cool shade of the porch.