By Keith Roulston, 

Though this is for the October issue, it is written weeks previously, with the soybeans still ripening in the fields around our house, and the corn still green. Still, as I look ahead to October, I think of Thanksgiving.

Here in 2024, we have so much to be thankful for. As I gaze out my farmhouse window (where I have lived nearly 50 years), I think how amazed the pioneers would have been who settled this land when it was covered by trees, and gradually hacked out a better living. Who could have imagined, as they planted crops by hand among the stumps, that someday mighty combines would harvest soybeans (who even heard of soybeans back then?) from two farms totalling 250 acres, in a single day?

Even consider what changes this house I live in has existed through. We have the odd scar in the hardwood of our kitchen where coals were dropped when cleaning the ashes from the wood stove that heated the house and cooked meals in the first half of this house’s existence. There are the remnants in our yard, of the windmill that must have seemed a miracle to residents of the time as it pumped water for the barn and for the kitchen.

Imagine the different world that electricity brought, from coal-oil lamps to electric lights, and eventually to electric cook stoves, refrigerators and radios and televisions.

When we bought this house in 1975, the previous owners had just installed an oil furnace. Since then we’ve converted to geo-thermal heating at a long-term saving of thousands of dollars a year.

We live in increasing comfort, not only heating in winter but air conditioning in the heat of summer.

These modern miracles in personal comfort are matched by advances in medicine. I recently re-read a book written by my childhood doctor, Dr. Victor Johnston, and the changes from the world he practiced in first, nearly a century ago, are almost unbelievable.

Even in my lifetime the world has been revolutionized. When I was young, we still suffered from yearly infections of polio. I remember  a man, Lorne Reid, who mended my shoes and sharpened my skates in Lucknow, who was crippled from the waist down by polio. We went from hundreds of cases a year across Ontario to none, when a vaccine became available in the 1950s.

When I was 11, I was infected by rheumatic fever and had to spend a winter in bed – at home because it was before medicare provided free hospital and medical service. Today people don’t even know what rheumatic fever is because better medication has wiped it out.

I had a damaged heart valve from that disease. Recently, surgeons replaced that valve with an artificial one, something that would have been unheard of a few decades ago.

How fortunate we are can be compared to stories from Africa where people are often homeless and walking from one place to another, all without regular medical care.

Or from war zones. Recently there was news of a child suffering from polio in war-torn Gaza that led to hundreds of thousands being given the polio vaccine under horrid conditions.

So as Thanksgiving approaches it’s so easy to see how fortunate I have been to live a life of regularly improving conditions, and in virtual peace. My father fought in Italy and Holland to help drive out Adolf Hitler and install peace, that has generally been only mildly interrupted (for us) in my lifetime.

But blessed as we are, we can’t become lazy. The pandemic taught how vulnerable we are, health wise, with thousands of deaths. Some people in Europe seem to cheer Hitler, not deplore him. This Thanksgiving we can celebrate, but we must also fight for our good life.◊