I’ve spent the past month in my hometown and the memories have flooded back as I’ve cross-crossed the side roads of the Beaver Valley. If you’re a Globe reader, perhaps you read my nostalgic piece last week?
Here’s another “Valley Story.” It’s about a wedding, a family farm, a young bride and her penniless friends.
I was twenty-one the year we got married, some might say my husband robbed the cradle, but as the years go by the gap in our age has shrunk. (I still find him quite immature!) The August we married, my parents, fiancé, three brothers and various cousins all lived together on the family farm, an apple orchard. The house, which had for years held six of us together, now heaved and groaned under the pressure of twelve. The well ran dry and we took to bathing in the bay each day after the work on the farm was done.
As the wedding day approached and all the little details came together, my parents raised a logistical question that hadn’t occurred to me. There was no more room in our house, but many more people were soon arriving who still needed a place to stay.
The Beaver Valley has many charming qualities. There’s the beautiful harbour, the quaint downtowns and the unforgettable winding drive down Grey Road #13 through Kimberly and Heathcote. However, it didn't have an abundance of hotels or inns. Today you could stay in Collingwood at the “Village”, the conglomeration of hotels put up in the early 2000’s by Intrawest, or a number of charming B&B's in Clarksburg, Thornbury or Meaford, but this story takes place before all that (before cellphones!) and the question of where to put up friends, specifically a young cohort of international students I’d met years before on Rotary exchange (who’d hatched elaborate plans to collect one another in train stations and airports across Southern Ontario), weighed on my parents. They wanted their oldest daughter’s wedding to be wonderful. They were, and still are, incredible hosts.
As anyone from a small town knows, word of our dilemma got out. Before long, neighbours offered up their bunkhouses. The Beaver Valley was once home to over 7,000 acres of apple orchards. Migrant workers from Trinidad, Jamaica and Mexico would arrive in the fall to help with the harvest . Our family has over thirty sets of linens neatly folded in a closet for the men who came year after year. Those flannel sheets and wool blankets came out in September and were washed and re-folded every November. But from December through August, the bunkhouses of the Valley mostly sat empty, and so it came to be that we found a solution for our guests. I was relieved to know they could walk up the road, through the orchards, and easily make their way to the wedding festivities.
The night before the wedding, the bridal party gathered in my parent’s large country garden and ran through the proceedings for the following day. I was feeling pretty relaxed on the whole.
Yes... I realize we look like teenagers.
My godmother, Pat, and I had even slipped out for a couple hours to lie on the beautiful sandy beach at Memorial Park in Meaford. Later, over dinner, I casually mentioned that my Rotary friends wouldn’t arrive until quite late, but I’d see them in the morning for breakfast. My dad suggested I put a sign at the end of the laneway so they could locate the farm where they’d be staying. So it came to be that the last task I did for my wedding was to grab a Sharpie, some cardboard and duct tape and post a big sign at the end of the laneway of the Fry farm, a couple kilometres down the road from our place. This was a farm our family had rented years earlier. I hadn’t been there for quite some time but I was grateful they were lending us their spare rooms. My fiancé went to a party with the groomsmen, I went to a neighbour’s farmhouse with the bridesmaids and my parents and godmother drank a glass of wine and prayed for safe travels for all our guests the following day.
Meanwhile, the airport pick-ups were not going well. Friends from Paris were delayed in New York followed by further delays in Hamilton. The sleepy melee that crammed into an old Buick didn’t arrive in the Valley until almost three o’clock in the morning. Luckily, they noticed my brilliant signs right away. They turned into the Fry’s driveway and slowly pulled in beside the clapboard cabins. As they dragged their tired bodies out of the car they wondered which of the four bunkhouses was meant for them. They tried the first door and found it locked. The other two doors were also shut tight. Finally, with a bit of a shove they were able to get into the fourth. They turned on the lights and surveyed the rooms. It was a bit musty but there were beds. Unfortunately, there were no blankets. Exhausted from their journey, they decided to cover themselves with their clothes and inquire about blankets in the morning. They were just about to fall asleep when the farmer came and knocked on the door.
“And who are you?” He pointed a flashlight at them through the dark.
They explained who they were and what they were there for. The farmer didn’t know anything about our wedding, but he knew who my father was so he let them stay. My friends, who had collectively travelled over 10,000 kilometres, spent their first night in the Valley listening to mice scurrying under their beds, curled up against one another for warmth, in an old bunkhouse, in the wrong orchard.
The following morning, my mother rose early and went down to the Taylor farm to welcome the guests who’d arrived in the night. She was surprised when she got there to see no one had slept in the beds she’d prepared. But it was my father who received the bigger shock when Mr. Fry called him up and asked who on earth had crashed his bunkhouse in the middle of the night.
Every bride is bound to make one mistake on her wedding day. When I awoke that morning and went to breakfast to greet my friends, I knew from the dark circles under their eyes they’d never let me forget that I’d failed to check which neighbour had lent us their space. Later on that evening, as we laughed and ate under the stars, the chauffeur of the late night intruders got up to propose a toast. I bit my lip, still mortified by my mistake and unsure of what he’d say. However, he didn’t raise a glass to me, my husband or our families. Instead, he rose a glass to the farmers of my hometown, the generous neighbours who opened their homes to all of them, but especially to the Frys, who were able to laugh, when strangers broke into their old bunkhouse in the middle of the night.