Graf #10

        I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s ever met a very, opinionated elderly person.  They’ve been doing things the same way for decades, and aren’t about to change now.  If you’re doing something the wrong way, they will be SURE to inform you of it, and to correct said behavior.  And correct they will.  We had a French-Canadian woman working on our farm just like that.  She was a bit of a manager at heart if you know what I mean.  And when we ran our piece-rate potato picking crew she sure would let her managing colors fly.  She made it her job whether she was asked to or not.     

        Raised French-Canadian in my area meant you were thrown into two languages at once right off the bat.  And for Peurette that led to an incredible understanding of French, along with the ability to navigate English relatively well.  Although for all of those young middle school potato pickers I’m sure it was rather difficult to navigate instruction barked by a hot tempered older woman with a heavy French accent.  And that’s what she did, bark, whether the owner was there or not.  Always throwing in a spare word here or there so fast and slurred nobody could understand it.  But you got the gist of it anyways, and you got to work. 

        All except one young boy named Shelby.  He was a rather rambunctious young man that knew just how to get the others going, Peurette especially.  If the pickers were throwing potatoes or rocks, you knew who started it.  And if a group of boys were digging into their lunches two hours early, you could pretty well tell who sparked such a great idea.  Peurette caught onto this, and tried to nip it in the butt, but was rather unsuccessful.  So occasionally you would hear odd utterances come from her that she had saved for just those “special occasions”.  On one occasion she seemed to have had enough, and finally confronted Shelby.  Shelby of course played the part of a smart mouth marvelously, and over the next few minutes unknowingly unraveled Peurette’s very last fuse.  That was it, she finally blew it.  That moment I had never heard so much French, so fast.  She started to say it under her breath, but towards the end of her rant you could clearly hear her as she stormed back to the work trailer.  While that may not have been the correct solution, it did however turn out that that was the last day that Shelby’s mother allowed him to show up for work.  Now whether or not his fun new vocabulary that he took home and demonstrated to his mother had anything to do with it, we’ll probably never know.  But to this day I still give Peurette props for her excellent French fluency, and the headaches she saved all of us that year.