Bittersweet Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #5): A Novel by Ruth Glover Page B
Authors: Ruth Glover
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her imagination.
I t was Saturday, time to do all the pre-Sunday chores that fell to a homemaker. Ellie lifted a cake from the oven, thrust a broom straw into it, deemed it done, and set it aside to cool for Sunday dinner.
Bliss churchgoers took literally the admonition of Exodus 20:9–10, “Six days shalt thou labour... but the seventh day is the sabbath of the L ORD thy God.” Saturday night would find not only Sunday’s clothes sponged, pressed, and ready for donning the next morning and shoes cleaned and polished but the house spic-and-span as well. Sunday’s dinner would be ready—pie or cake covered and waiting, fresh buns baked and awaiting reheating, vegetables peeled and set in water overnight.
At least, Ellie always thought, cleaning up the kitchen for the last time Saturday night, perhaps consoling herself for her single estate, there were no children’s baths to give, no little heads to wash. Having been a part of the bathing ritual for many years, she was well accustomed to the Saturday night regimen—dragging in the zinc tub, setting it before the stove and filling it with water, climbing in, doubling up, washing from head to toe.
Growing up the youngest member of the Bonney family, she had the privilege of the first bath. After she was off to bed, herparents took turns, first Serena, presumably not as dusty and dirty as her husband, then Bran, scrubbing away the week’s grime. Ellie always felt sorry for her father having to bathe in used bathwater, but he laughed at her concern and assured her he didn’t mind her “little bit of clean dirt.”
Thinking of those days, Ellie couldn’t refrain from smiling, almost chuckling aloud, as memory took her back to that day of the Busy Bees’ first assignment: the scrubbing of the heads of the Nikolai children—all but the baby who wouldn’t be pried away from his mother’s arms. The startled parents, probably puzzled at the practices of these new-country people, had submitted with good nature as the girls arrived, soap and towels in hand, to set up basins on old tree stumps in the yard, fill them with water brought from the range’s reservoir, and, one by one, bend the matted blond heads of the children and begin soaping. An assembly line of sorts had been devised, with Marfa and Vonnie washing, Flossy rinsing, and Ellie combing. The Busy Bees had left the Nikolai farm that day riding the crest of satisfaction for a good deed well done. Though they would have liked to, they knew themselves to be too young to give the overburdened mother the stern injunction, “These heads should be washed every Saturday night!”
Tucking away the memory—the inauguration of the Busy Bees’ pursuits—Ellie returned to her preparations for Sunday.
She had been well taught; Serena had automatically performed duty after duty, week after week, year after year and, as a good mother, had instructed the daughter who was always at her side.
The final task remaining to Ellie this Saturday was to search out a chicken—the unlucky one that didn’t scurry squawking away as quickly as the others—chop off its head, scald and pluck it, clean it, and hang it down the well. Sunday morning, before leaving for church, she would put it into a roasting pan and pop it into the oven. With the firebox stoked with wood and the damper adjusted, dinner should be ready and waiting when she and her father got home. It was a good system; all over Bliss it would be in effect. A good system and, they believed, a godly one.
But there was good sense mixed with bush beliefs. Did not Jesus himself say, when he was criticized for healing on the Sabbath, “Doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering?” (Luke 13:15).
In the Canadian bush, not only was there the watering of animals but feeding and milking as well. And if a cow should decide to give birth on a Sunday, or if a horse cut itself on barbed wire, had not the “ox
I t was Saturday, time to do all the pre-Sunday chores that fell to a homemaker. Ellie lifted a cake from the oven, thrust a broom straw into it, deemed it done, and set it aside to cool for Sunday dinner.
Bliss churchgoers took literally the admonition of Exodus 20:9–10, “Six days shalt thou labour... but the seventh day is the sabbath of the L ORD thy God.” Saturday night would find not only Sunday’s clothes sponged, pressed, and ready for donning the next morning and shoes cleaned and polished but the house spic-and-span as well. Sunday’s dinner would be ready—pie or cake covered and waiting, fresh buns baked and awaiting reheating, vegetables peeled and set in water overnight.
At least, Ellie always thought, cleaning up the kitchen for the last time Saturday night, perhaps consoling herself for her single estate, there were no children’s baths to give, no little heads to wash. Having been a part of the bathing ritual for many years, she was well accustomed to the Saturday night regimen—dragging in the zinc tub, setting it before the stove and filling it with water, climbing in, doubling up, washing from head to toe.
Growing up the youngest member of the Bonney family, she had the privilege of the first bath. After she was off to bed, herparents took turns, first Serena, presumably not as dusty and dirty as her husband, then Bran, scrubbing away the week’s grime. Ellie always felt sorry for her father having to bathe in used bathwater, but he laughed at her concern and assured her he didn’t mind her “little bit of clean dirt.”
Thinking of those days, Ellie couldn’t refrain from smiling, almost chuckling aloud, as memory took her back to that day of the Busy Bees’ first assignment: the scrubbing of the heads of the Nikolai children—all but the baby who wouldn’t be pried away from his mother’s arms. The startled parents, probably puzzled at the practices of these new-country people, had submitted with good nature as the girls arrived, soap and towels in hand, to set up basins on old tree stumps in the yard, fill them with water brought from the range’s reservoir, and, one by one, bend the matted blond heads of the children and begin soaping. An assembly line of sorts had been devised, with Marfa and Vonnie washing, Flossy rinsing, and Ellie combing. The Busy Bees had left the Nikolai farm that day riding the crest of satisfaction for a good deed well done. Though they would have liked to, they knew themselves to be too young to give the overburdened mother the stern injunction, “These heads should be washed every Saturday night!”
Tucking away the memory—the inauguration of the Busy Bees’ pursuits—Ellie returned to her preparations for Sunday.
She had been well taught; Serena had automatically performed duty after duty, week after week, year after year and, as a good mother, had instructed the daughter who was always at her side.
The final task remaining to Ellie this Saturday was to search out a chicken—the unlucky one that didn’t scurry squawking away as quickly as the others—chop off its head, scald and pluck it, clean it, and hang it down the well. Sunday morning, before leaving for church, she would put it into a roasting pan and pop it into the oven. With the firebox stoked with wood and the damper adjusted, dinner should be ready and waiting when she and her father got home. It was a good system; all over Bliss it would be in effect. A good system and, they believed, a godly one.
But there was good sense mixed with bush beliefs. Did not Jesus himself say, when he was criticized for healing on the Sabbath, “Doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering?” (Luke 13:15).
In the Canadian bush, not only was there the watering of animals but feeding and milking as well. And if a cow should decide to give birth on a Sunday, or if a horse cut itself on barbed wire, had not the “ox
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