Down Clearbrook Road: A Girl in a BC Mennonite Village, 1946 -1951

From Alberta, a young Mennonite girl arrives in BC, a"promised land of fruit and relatives. The fruit, it turns out, needs pickers and relatives want kids to work. Even her imagined fabulous "States" is across a border. Her parents buy a farm on Clearbrook Road and she's in a village where everyone attends church and knows things. Pastures with huge stumps turn into berry patches and farmyards grow chicken barns. There's a Fraser River flood, a death in her school. She makes new friends at the MEI high school. She keeps a five year journal, champions justice and rebels against female/male stereotypes. She discovers roller skating, group dating and the secular world. For the Mennonite village it is a time of creeping modernity where kids explore choices and parens are consumed with relief work with post WWII refugees arriving from Europe. Her parents were refugees from Soviet Russia. The many photographs in the book, taken by amateurs with inexpensive cameras (mostly from family albums) reflect the late 1940s and early 1950s where teenage views and the community too were often still emerging.