I watched this video this afternoon (the cat on my lap was *not* impressed, let me tell you) and it made me smile:

My smile had a little something to do with the pissed off cat, a little something to do with the dog in the video and a whole lot to do with memories from my childhood.

As a kid I lived in and around (on farms) a handful of different small towns in southern Alberta. For as long as I can remember my grandmother has lived (and still does) in Nanton, Alberta. We lived there too when I was quite young, from about 4 until 9 or 10. I went to kindergarten in ‘the old school’ there the last year it was open and grade one at A. B. Daley School the first year it opened. When I left my first husband it was Nanton that I moved to with my very young daughter to do the single mother thing, and I lived there for a few years before moving up here to Edmonton to be with Jo.

Many of my happy memories from my childhood in Nanton have to do with summer (let’s just say I never fit in at school LoL).

Nanton used to have a noon whistle. It’s my understanding that it was actually an air raid siren, but since it was peacetime it had been re-purposed. Every day when there was no school (so summer and weekends) my brother, cousins and I were sort of let loose on the town. We had bicycles, a season’s pass to the swimming pool and active imaginations, what more did we need? And every day we knew it was time to come home for lunch when we heard the noon whistle.

Actually, we knew it was time to come home for lunch when we heard every single dog in town begin to howl.

The dogs always started to bark and howl a couple seconds before the siren went off.

I guess they could hear it before we could and it must have hurt their ears, poor things, because let me tell you — no matter where you were in town, when that siren went off, you heard it.

Anyway, that video reminded me of those days. “Simpler” days. You can’t go back, but sometimes it’s nice to remember and smile.

I don’t know when they stopped the noon whistle, but I bet all the animals in town, especially those who lived nearby, were grateful when they did 🙂

Anyway, I just wanted to share that and it was a few too many characters for Twitter or Facebook LOL I’ll try to make my next post writing-related 😉