THE PLUMBING BUSINESS

In the morning, uncle Victor came to the station with the farm pickup truck. On the way back he stopped for several hours at his brother’s plumbing business where he was a busy apprentice, not really wanting to run the farm after grandpa Joseph Napoleon had died. No one of the 16 kids wanted to be farmers except older uncle Ephrem who already had his own farm. All the others moved to cities and learned other trades, plumbing high on their list, with retail machinery not far behind. Uncle Ludger became a lawyer and later mayor of Dalhousie, yet most of my uncles had to deal with sewerage or greasy machinery. Two of my aunts became nurses, moved and married in Quebec City, Marthe a doctor and Yolande, a traveling salesman. Meanwhile, my mother turned out as a steno-typist for Montreal lawyers, married Albert and had Yvette and me during the war in distant Winnipeg. Dad was a chemical engineer in ammo factories all over Canada. The last one was in a Quebec village suitably called "Nitro". That summer in peacetime Valleyfield just a few miles west of Nitro, mom was raising five children born within just seven years. With her varicose vein problems, losing me for a month was a brilliant idea. And then it dawned on me recently that I probably was to provide help and companionship to grandma Clementine, now alone on the farm most of the time. And I was now in Dalhousie NB with many uncles in a smokey dark shop with its garage door wide open. And so I spent an exciting afternoon watching molten lead being poured to seal cast iron sewer components, the uncles shaking my hand after wiping their own on the back of their pants. This was my first contact with uncles Roger, Louis, Paul, Gabriel, Victor, Jean-Marie, Maurice, Ludger, Ephrem etc..etc.. the word having spread out that the son of their adventurous sister Geraldine was in town, visitors popped up from time to time around that plumbing tree being built, each with a personal "bon mot" or little joke I could appreciate. There was a lot of noise and a lot of laughter from these big men not know well yet.

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