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By Mary Spring<\/em><\/p>\n My mother was born in 1919, near Elrose, Saskatchewan, in the middle of the prairie. She was the eldest of six children. I share this information because my mother lived in unprecedented times. My mother and her siblings survived.<\/p>\n As young children, my sisters and I heard stories of life on the prairie in the 1920s and ’30s. There were the blistering summer days and the frigid winters. The winds were unrelenting and locusts actually fell from the sky. There was the 1929 Depression and the crash of the stock markets.<\/p>\n Their father, my grandfather survived, somewhat, the trenches of World War I and they lived through World War II. My grandparents survived the Spanish Flu in 1918.<\/p>\n School for my mother and her siblings was very different than what we know.<\/p>\n There was no schoolhouse and no teacher. The children were taught by their parents, neither of whom had any training. My sisters and I are sure that they spent most of their time playing outside, dodging the snow, the heat, the wind and the locusts.<\/p>\n My mother and her siblings completed high school by correspondence. Most of them completed post-secondary education. They all became happy, successful adults. Those were unprecedented times and they survived.<\/p>\n\n\t\t