My full name is Lynn Elaine MacMillan. I was born in Charlottetown on September 10, 1953. I grew up in West Covehead, PEI and attended West Covehead Rural School, a very small two room school until grade 8. I then attended Charlottetown Rural High School.  Several years later after moving to Moncton, NB, I attended Oulton's Business College and received my secretarial diploma. After living on PEI again for 12 years, I now live in Calgary, Alberta where I work for a radiology company as a medical transcriptionist.

 

 

My childhood in West Covehead was very simple. My mother died when I was only 5 years old, so we had a housekeeper named Belle Maye who looked after me until I was 12 years old. There were few children close by to play with, but our neighbor across the road had grandchildren who would visit often so they were my main playmates. My brother used to take me fishing almost every weekend in the summer in a stream behind our house and my best friend was my dog, Ginger, who went everywhere with me.  My sister and brother were a lot older than I was and I was probably quite annoying to them when I was little. When I got older, I used to help out in my father's store. In the summer I used to spend a lot of time at the beach. At school we used to play in the woods across the road at lunch time and had a lot of fun playing hide and seek and building forts and playhouses. Our teacher was very strict and used to use a strap frequently on the children. We were all terrified of the strap, so one day in the summer when school was out, myself and some friends went into the school (the doors were not locked) and stole the strap from her desk and hid it away back in the woods. When school began in the fall and the teacher went to get her strap to punish one of the children, we all had a great laugh because it was gone. She didn't say anything, but unfortunately the next day she came to school with an even bigger strap, so our little prank certainly backfired!

 

I used to walk to school every day, and when I was a bit older I was allowed to ride my bike there instead. During the winter, if a storm came up when we were at school, one of the neighbors would come and pick us up with his horse and sleigh and we would cover up with a warm buffalo hide to stay warm. We used to love those stormy days! I think we used to get a lot more snow when I was little than we get now. In the winter, we used to go skating on one of the outdoor ponds almost every day after school. One day the ice broke and I fell in scaring myself very badly. Thank goodness there were people there to pull me out.

 

I do remember when I was very young that there was a very bad winter storm, so bad that the snowplough that came out from Charlottetown got stuck right in front of our house and the driver had to come and stay with us for the night. The snow was so deep that another plow couldn't get through to dig him out, so all the men in the community had to bring out their horses and used shovels to dig the road by hand so the plow could get through. It took three days to dig that plow out.

 

 I also remember a very bad lightning storm that happened one summer evening. There was a tremendous crash and then a strong smell of sulphur, and my brother and I looked up and saw a fireball slowly circling the light in our kitchen. I was terrified and ran screaming from the room, and to this day I am still afraid of thunder and lightning.