These wayside cauldrons of eastern Canada, with their constant fires, and their contents always “a-bubble, bubble, bubble”, unlike the witches’ pot on the heath of auld Scotia with its song of “trouble”, are to the countryside emblematical not of disaster but of a wonderful domestic prowess that is far-reaching indeed in its scope and effect upon national life.
For although many of these wayside pots look common-place affairs in themselves, the crudest and least artistic of them represents the individuality and the effort of some man or woman who stands behind it, who fathers the thought of it and the work it is intended to aid in accomplishing.
Even when you pass one of these out-of-doors pots, whose fires are extinct until wash-day or dyeing day comes round again, you unconsciously feel at once through the pot’s suggestion that in that little farm-house, over there by the barn, dwells a woman with initiative; some strong capable soul—some mother of invention—who turns every simple object at her command into a tool of service.
Investigation of the pots in active service reveals a long list of different works which this one utensil is able to accomplish. The Quebec habitant woman graciously informs madame, that by means of the pot she accomplishes the great wash for her “grande famille”, and that in it she dyes her home-grown wool clipped from the sheep grazing over there on the Laurentian hillsides. After every operation she scrubs the interior of the pot thoroughly, so that though one day it accomplishes the dyeing, the next it may be used to heat the water for M’sieu to convert the big porker into winter meat for the family, etc.
Madame’s faith in the great pot is expressed in her tones. To her mind the pot is indispensable on every well-regulated farm, an absolute necessity in every household. The very children take it for granted. The wood-pile and the pot-by-the-running-brook are to them as natural objects of the landscape as the blue mountains or La Chute de Montmorenci.
Moreover, the pots are more than this in their enfant days. The youngest child of Old Quebec looks upon work avec plaisir. To little French Canadian children, what we are pleased to call “work”, is the highest form of play. Every child, and nearly every grown-up, loves to build and keep going, a wood-fire out-of-doors. The great pots of Quebec and Nova Scotia give children an opportunity to serve at a fire and to serve with pleasure. They run about and gather the chips and the flotsam and jetsam yielded by the nearby stream, or fallen branches from the trees, while an older girl pushes the various contributions of wood into the bright and cheery bonfire under the pot that, with the strange faculty of inanimate things, often takes on a look of enjoying it all as much as the children. Thus, wash-day or soap-making day becomes to these eastern households a sort of picnic. Many hands make light work, and madame of the grande famille of sixteen or eighteen children accomplishes her wash of seventy-five to a hundred pieces with signal ease and entirely without complaint through the pot’s assistance—the pot that hangs under the blue skies above the glowing coals—the out-of-door pot that magnetizes the willing hands of normal children.
Dye-pots, wash-pots, soap-pots are essentially and quite naturally enough presided over by women. These things come under “women’s work”. Such pots, as I have hinted above, have their positions determined by the presence of some small brook that runs through the farm. The place of the pot, of necessity, follows the vagaries of the brook. (“If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain”.) Thus it follows that the eastern Canadian wayside pot may be situated near the house or several hundred yards away, in some pasture through which the brook flows. The pot is carried to the water, but the water is never brought to the pot, which is a thing to remember. Canadian women are canny! And, the farther away from home the pot stands, the more of a picnic soap-making day becomes for both mother and children. The ways of these wayside pots are past finding out to the casual man or woman driving over these rural ribbon-roads of the Laurentides, unless this is remembered. For one pot may be so close to the road as to cause his horse to shy, while the next may be off in a field with no house
A WAYSIDE POT.