Village (the)

noun, Marysville, ON, the (only) town onWolfe Island; see location on map

“I remember my dad talking about it. There were sidewalks so they used to race horse and buggies up and down through the Village.”

“I was in a ice hole once with Tom, and that was in the Village. We went through, but I didn’t get wet or anything that time.”

“Everybody came to swim up at our place because it was sandy, a nice bottom, so they’d come carloads from the Village out, and everybody’d swim.”

“The first day I went to high school my father drove me down to the Village in a horse and buggy.”

“They brought the ice punt. They’d park it down by the dock here, and we’d give them a ride to the Village or a ride to the ferry or whatever.”

“You’re gonna laugh at me. There was one in the Village here, which I saw years ago … And that one was a four-holer!”

“They used to do the street dances. Remember when we used to have the streets? In the middle of the street, we’d have them. I remember one year they had them right on the dock in the Village where the ferry docks in the Village.

“We used to have this music teacher. We had an old school at the end of the Village here, and it was like a rocky ledge where the school was, and anyway, we filled her car full of garter snakes. So they were crawling around the steering wheel and the sun visor …  She was not very happy.”

“I can’t remember too many more vehicles ever being on the Island at that. A lot of farmers would phone in, see if Len was bringing his car into the Village, because that farmer had to come into the Village to get his grist ground. And the horses were dead scared. They’d never seen them or heard them before, eh.”

“The kids did the newspaper the next day. Well, I mean they had nothing else to do, right? We could get to the lane, so we drove them to the Village, and everybody got their papers. So that was kind of fun. But oh, even the branches, it really looked like a war zone … So that was the big ice storm of ninety eight.”

“I was kind of fortunate when you think about it, because like my dad, well two or three times a week, he’d be taking whey-cream to the 1:00 boat for to ship to the creamery in Kingston. So that gave me a trip down to the Village two or three times a week.”

“I don’t know, you saw a lot of things that, you know, especially in the Village. The boat always landed there, and it was a steamboat. I always wanted to get away from there before the whistle blew up.”

“We were sort of water people. My father, his father was a captain. They lived in the Village here when he was a kid. And he was on the freighters, his father. And my father sailed on a schooner for a little while.”

“We just stayed in the Village, and we would come up for milking in the morning and milking at night if I wasn’t in school or that, eh. But I can remember, didn’t matter if it was thunder, lightning, teeming rain, we just catch the horse, and he would throw me up on him, and I’d start for the cows. And as Sarah will tell you, for some reason when August comes along, cows start breaking out of pastures. Grass is always greener right?”