Song Lyrics

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The Old Soddy

The old sod shack stood alone and desolate on the broad open prairie. The windows blackened with prairie dust and dirt. The torn ragged rawhide, covering the door some how survived the years between when it kept out the cold of winter and the warmth of summer, still hung on its hooks. The harness by the opening suggested the family who lived here owned a horse to, to what? Possibly plow the unyielding soil that had made the house they lived in. If this home made out of the earth could talk it would tell about a young family of immigrants who came from their home across the sea to start a new life in a new land. The father, who took his wife, sons and daughter from a home they knew, with family and friends to what he isn’t so sure any more. He stands in a strange and desolate expanse of nothing. Here he was going to farm the fertile prairie he’d heard so much about. Here he was going to build a prospering farm that would care for his family for generations. It was with his own hands he had built this soddy to house his family. He and his sons had hued out the squares of prairie earth and with precious water mixed the mud to hold it together. The one room was divided with blankets into a kitchen cum sitting room and two bedrooms one for the parents and one for the boys, the girl slept on the cot in the kitchen/sitting room. The wood for the furniture was hauled from Saskatoon, the biggest city near the young family. The mother used buffalo chips, the boys found, to heat the fire to cook meals. It was a hard and lonely life but our forefathers did it and survived. We have no idea what they went through to make Canada what it is today.
The old soddy could tell many stories if only it could only talk.

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