A Gift that Keeps on Giving
After school, I’d sit in our sunny kitchen with a snack and listen to the stories my mom would tell as she ironed, canned preserves, or made supper. The stories in my memory are mixed up with the scent of clean sheets, strawberry jam, and roast chicken. And now, many years after she has passed away, my mother’s stories come back to me quite suddenly when I least expect them. In an elevator. Walking to a local gallery. Driving to get groceries. These stories remind me of the person I want to be—always a better person than I am now—which is, I think, one of the inherent gifts of a good story, be it oral or written.
Many of my mother’s stories were situated in her childhood on the prairies during the Great Depression. Born in 1916, my mother had firsthand experiences of dismal crops, extensive drought, and the kind of poverty that blew into the very bones of people, destroying their will to survive. On the farm where my mother’s family lived, they always had enough to eat, but some of her friends weren’t so lucky. My mother recalled one Christmas when she received the contents of a stocking—nuts, a few candies, an orange—and an India rubber ball, while a neighbour child only received a few potatoes cleverly glued together to resemble an elephant in miniature. Another friend only got the top off her father’s egg for breakfast—never a whole egg. And many children in my mother’s community had only unleavened bread to eat, often burned from the uneven heat of their family’s wood-burning stove.
To assist farmers, the Saskatchewan government placed a bounty on gopher tails, and the teacher would give my mother and her schoolmates two cents a tail. The children became adept at snaring the little wheat-eating rodents, pulling snarled bundles of tails from their coat pockets and replacing them with precious pennies. One of my mother’s friends developed a technique of splitting the tails in half, earning double the wage. “Those are awfully small tails,” the teacher said, curling her lip at the sight of them. “Thems from baby gophers!” the boy quickly answered.
My mother created a little book of pressed wildflowers and won first prize— two dollars—at the local fair. For one plant whose real name eluded both her and her teacher, she printed “Purple Bells of Blossom” underneath and imagined that to be the best name ever.
As I grew older, the stories my mother shared grew more complex. She told of another neighbour, a “mail order” bride in the 1930s, who had arrived in Canada expecting a comfortable home like she had in England, and who discovered that her husband-to-be was a rough and hardened farmer living in a coal-heated dirt-floor shack. Laws at that time gave her no opportunity for enough financial freedom to escape.
Some of the stories were humorous, such as the travelling salesman who sold her father a “never-fail” potato-beetle exterminator and who promised perfect results or money back. After paying hard-earned dollars and watching the salesman disappear down the dirt road, my grandfather opened the package to reveal a small mortar and pestle. “Place potato beetle in bowl, and crush,” were the instructions. Hard to claim it didn’t work, but….
Other stories involved my mother’s teaching career, ten years spent in one-room schoolhouses working with children too bruised by life to offer any resistance to learning. One day, my mother noticed how young Billy, in grade one, opened his lunch tin very carefully, putting his head down to inspect what he had, and then eat it, in secret. The next day, during morning lessons, my mother slipped out to the boot room and took a look into Billy’s container. It was empty. “Billy, could you help me finish my milk?” she asked him at lunchtime. “I have more than I can use, and I don’t want it, or this extra sandwich, to go to waste.” He was only too delighted to assist.
Her wage in those days was 250 Canadian dollars a year, just a tiny fraction of what teachers today receive. Family members listening to her stories might suggest that everything cost less in those days. After all, an ice-cream cone could be purchased for five cents.” Maybe so,” my mother would answer. “But I never knew a teacher to have a car. Or a house of their own. We paid room and board for subsistence living, and never had a penny extra to put in the bank.”
And at that time, a male teacher earned 50 dollars more per year than a female teacher. “Because they could shovel the coal for the furnace,” my mother suggested. However, she always had to pay a local man to do that out of her own meagre salary.
One year, when the economy in the province of Saskatchewan was very bad, the Ontario government sent boxes of relief apples, given for free to teachers and students. Another year, Ontario teachers themselves sent money directly to their Saskatchewan colleagues—ten dollars each—at Christmas time. Without that money, my mother would not have had train fare to travel home for the holidays, nor money to purchase candy canes for her students.
In one of the country schools where my mother taught grades one through eight, there was an older boy who presented very unusual behaviour. He was uncannily good at mathematics and kept all the scores of community baseball games in his head to recite whenever people asked about a particular year gone by. He often echoed what people said and flapped his hands, and he wasn’t progressing very well in most of his school subjects. Today, a child like this might receive an autism diagnosis, but autism hadn’t yet been recognized. “How are you getting along with Thomas?” a neighbour asked my mother, a young teacher of eighteen. “Well, he gets on my nerves sometimes,” my mother answered. The next day, Thomas wasn’t in school. Nor was he in school the day after that. The family had no phone, so after the lessons were finished, my mother walked the three miles to their farm. A raggedly dressed farm woman answered her knock. “Is Thomas unwell?” my mother asked. “He hasn’t been at school.”
“I heard that… you said… he gets on your nerves,” said the boy’s mother, haltingly. “So he isn’t coming back.”
And then the woman slammed the door. My mother stood there, frozen to the spot. How could she make this right? She waited to catch her breath, and then she knocked again. When the door finally opened, she quickly stepped inside. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I did say that about Thomas, but you know, I’m very new at teaching, and all of the children get on my nerves sometimes. I like Thomas. And I’d like him back at school.” Thomas’s mother looked at her and rubbed a hand across her brow. “We’ll see,” was all she said. But Thomas was back at school the next day. And every day.
Be grateful for what you have. Be industrious and creative. Be careful when accepting propositions. Be kind. Be generous. Don’t gossip. Respect everyone. The lessons from my mother’s stories have taught me a great deal about how to navigate my own life, how to raise our children, and, later, to become the teacher I wanted to be by telling stories of my own.
“Tell the one about…” my students would ask, hoping to hear their favourite stories told again and again.
And the more stories I told, of my own life, and as we progressed into the school year, of our own shared experiences, the more connected my classroom became.
And the more my students began to tell stories of their own.
Given the chance, we are all authors. Through my mother’s generous legacy, I have learned to think about the world and my life as a series of stories—stories already completed or stories waiting to happen. And I hope that my students and my own children honour their stories and tell them. Because as we travel onward, it is our stories that emerge as the very best souvenirs of a life well lived—a gift that keeps on giving.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Beverley Brenna
Beverley Brenna is the author of 14 traditionally published books for young people (with two additional middle-grade novels in press) and two scholarly titles on Canadian Children’s Literature. Her work has been shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award and included on CBC’s list of Young Adult Books That Make You Proud to Be Canadian. After teaching in elementary classrooms and special education settings, as well as in postsecondary education, Beverley is now a professor emerita at the University of Saskatchewan.
This article is featured in Canadian Teacher Magazine’s Spring 2026 issue.
