New life with nails and mortar

INNISFAIL - "Hey, watch it!" Pirkko squealed as a piece of old mortar grazed her flushed cheek.

"So sooorry," I shouted, above the din of hammers and flying mortar. We had been told to chip off cement from discarded bricks. It was our father's idea of saving money as we built our first home in Canada.

Two years prior, on April 4, 1957, our family had landed in blowing snow at Gander, Newfoundland after a 12-hour flight from Helsinki, Finland. The next day a storm diverted our Pan American Toronto flight to Buffalo, N.Y. After a long bus ride our weary and dishevelled family entered the regal lobby of Toronto's Royal York Hotel. We experienced ice cream and television for the first time in our lives!

"Now we are in Canada," father explained as the six of us children ranging from three months to 12 years, stood at the Sudbury Airport surrounded by five enormous duffel bags. Father was proud of his children and of our mother. After all, she knew a few words of English, this strange language which we would all have to learn.

Building a house for us was a first priority. Father worked three jobs and scrounged demolition sites for cheap building material. Eero, our oldest brother, pulled nails from used boards. Pirkko and I did brick duty. During construction we lived next door in an apartment which our neighbour farmer had remodelled out of a commercial chicken house. Working in that small space, mother no doubt dreamed about the room, which our new home would provide for her large brood. It would include a flush toilet.

Ever the storyteller, mother would gather us around her full skirts and tell us about wonderful Pastor Kyllonen who welcomed us to Sudbury and found a job for our dad at a steel foundry. We were never to forget those who went out of their way to make us comfortable in Canada, our new home. If we complained mother would say, "We chose to come to Canada and this is where we will stay." End of conversation. No more doubts.

We knew that there were no problems our dad could not solve. He was a draftsman by trade and a builder by choice. He was also a pastor. If these strengths were not enough for one man, our father was also an artist. He turned his creativity to masonry, building a retaining wall of river rocks, an artistic touch to an otherwise modest home. With that stone wall we could almost forget that the house was made of used building materials. We were proud of our ingenious father!

But our faith was about to be shattered. At the end of one exhausting day mother ran over to the retaining wall to find father slumped over his mortar trowel. He had suffered a massive heart attack. Our tower of strength had toppled. Now who was going to solve this problem?

Once again, mother gathered her "chicks" around her ample bosom. With tears staining her apron she whispered, "It will be all right. God will take care of us." That faith soon materialized into food and clothes from the wonderful people of Sudbury. We children drew strength from mother's optimism and watched as she, for the first time in her life, went to work cleaning a local bakery. It came with perks -- day-old sliced white bread. Canadian bread!

Miraculously, father recovered and completed the stone wall. But building no longer had the same allure for him. He now wanted to give back, to serve. A new phase began in our lives as father accepted the position of shepherding a small Finnish church in Montreal. Our dream home was rented out and the five duffle bags loaded.

We lived in St.Henri, Montreal's multicultural ghetto. Greeks ran the gas station at the end of our street. With Italian and Barbadian school buddies we learned to balance on railway tracks. We joked with the factory workers on their lunch breaks, and marvelled at the cycling grocery boys whose baskets teetered with delivery goods. So we flourished as Finnish-Canadians opened their homes to our large family.

Through those years father had gently guided us to acknowledge that there is One whose care and compassion eclipses that of earthly parents. Even ours. He is the One who had been strong when father was not. The One who had provided when father could not. Whether conscious of it or not, we had been carried by invisible arms. Whether we were chipping mortar, pulling nails or quarrelling when mother was cleaning the bakery, God had been there all along. We were in good hands.

Mirjam (Sorila) Rand is an Innisfail-area writer and photographer. This year, Canada's 150th birthday, she is celebrating the 60th anniversary of her family's arrival in Canada.