Letters From a Wartime House

Sep 6

3 min read

Letter 10: Labour Day

It is Labour Day weekend again.

For most of us, Tuesday will bring the familiar rhythm of school and work, alarm clocks, packed lunches, missing shoes, traffic, dinner, laundry, and the never-ending question of what to make for dinner.

It is so easy to think of these things as the ordinary burdens of life, but I can’t help wondering what Labour Day might have looked like for the first family living in this house.

By the early 1940s, work and home life carried a different kind of weight. There were meals to prepare, children to care for, gardens to tend and households to keep running, but for many families, there was also a war being fought far beyond their doorstep.

Perhaps a husband was already overseas.

Perhaps a son had enlisted.

Perhaps someone was waiting for a letter, wondering when, or if, their loved one would come home.

We don’t know exactly what was happening inside these walls then. We can only imagine.

But this house has given us little glimpses of its former life.

Under layers of weathered yellow paint, the original siding colours have begun to reveal themselves: terracotta with white gables.

Inside the walls, we uncovered the original windows and their weights. We found evidence of the original kitchen layout, from before the sunroom was added, when the kitchen window would have looked directly out into the yard.

Sometimes I stand at our kitchen sink and think about that.

Today, the view from our kitchen is into the sunroom, and the layout has been completely changed to suit the needs of our family, but once, someone standing in that same kitchen would have looked directly out into the yard, perhaps toward the very spot where our cherry tree now grows - a tree I have come to adore.

There are other little clues too. The basement staircase that would once have led from what is now our pantry. The lasting impression of a cold room, still visible in the marks left behind on the concrete floor.

None of these things tell us exactly what life was like here, but they leave impressions.

I often think about them when I look at the wonderfully mundane things that fill our days.

Tuesday, we will worry about getting everyone to school on time and making it through another workday. Then we’ll come home and there will be food in the cupboards, lights in the windows, and family around the table.

No telegrams to dread. No loved ones waiting somewhere across an ocean. No uncertainty about whether they would ever walk through the front door again.

Just the ordinary work of ordinary life.

Perhaps that is worth remembering this Labour Day.

This house has a funny way of teaching me lessons without saying a word.

Simply living here, and taking the time to wonder about the people who lived here before me, has a way of putting the present into perspective.

The walls don’t tell me exactly what happened here. They remind me that life has always been full of work, worry, love, loss and ordinary days that probably felt anything but ordinary at the time.

Sometimes the things we call everyday problems are actually evidence of how incredibly fortunate we are.

Happy Labour Day.