During this festive season, it seems fitting to honour Annie Dyck, a senior living at the Niverville Credit Union Manor and celebrating her ninetieth birthday on December 25.

I first met Annie at a watermelon and roll kuchen event held in the manor’s cafeteria. She sat next to me there and, while she’s a petite five-foot-nothing, she consumed more watermelon than I’d seen anyone eat in a very long time.

Watermelon, it turns out, has been a favourite treat since she was a child. Since that day, she’s become fondly known to me as the Watermelon Lady.

Annie and her husband made their home at the manor in 2007, before the facility was yet complete. A few years later, she lost her husband, shortly after he turned 100 years of age. They had been married for 51 years.

She’s had a good life, she says, which began on a significant day in 1929. A few years ago, Annie penned a short story about what she imagined her Christmas birth might have looked like.

“It was a cold winter night, the moon was out, and the stars were shining,” wrote Annie. “The crisp, cold snow was glistening and the fields looked like glass. The horses’ hooves and the clanging of the horses’ bells could be clearly heard on the long road that led to the farmhouse where my parents lived.”

Annie elaborates on what that day might have been like for the visiting grandparents, pleased to welcome their blonde baby child on this special day.

“The God of the universe timed it exactly right and gifted the firstborn to this couple on Jesus’ birthday,” Annie continues. 

Farm Childhood 

Annie was born on a farm in Plum Coulee as the first of seven children. She has many fond memories of life as a child on the farm. The snowbanks, she says, seemed bigger then and provided endless hours of play. She also loved to skate on an outdoor rink with her siblings and friends.

“My little brother had a pony,” Annie says. “We had an open cutter and this pony would [pull] us… I remember I wore leather finger gloves and it was so cold that I froze my fingers. Why would I wear that? I wanted to be pretty.”

She grew up, though, without special attention being paid to her birthday. It wasn’t until she was 16 years old that her mother threw her a party with friends.

“I always felt gipped,” Annie says.

In spite of that, she has fond memories of Christmases past—festivities spent at her grandparents’ home and a dinner table heavily laden with traditional Mennonite foods like plumi moos, a plum soup served cold—and one of Annie’s favourites.

Her most memorable Christmas gift was an Eaton’s doll.

“We always had dolls, but these were more beautiful,” she says. “They had beautiful hair.”

On occasion over the years, she was even allowed to accompany her parents to the Eaton’s store in downtown Winnipeg. It was a different kind of shopping experience than we know today. Eaton’s shoppers would sit at tables and page through catalogues, ordering their products at a desk and waiting while someone carried it in from the warehouse in the back.

As a teen, her father gave her a rare opportunity to raise money of her own.

“My sister Mary and I had turkeys,” says Annie. “My dad bought us a hundred of them so we could raise them and the money could be ours… And of course they were off the yard so we had to get the tractor and haul all the [food] and water down there. Then fall came and we sold the turkeys and had the cash in our hands.”

To this day, she can’t recall what her and her sister spent the money on. 

A Nursing Career 

In the 1940s, after completing grade school and one year at Bible school, Annie moved to Winnipeg to begin training as a nurse at the city’s Normal School.

“I was one of the first graduates in Canada to graduate from the licensed practical nursing course,” Annie recalls.

Soon after, she moved to Ninette, Manitoba to extend her training and learn how to deal with patients suffering from tuberculosis.

The Ninette Sanatorium would later become known for its unique contributions to the treatment of the disease and for offering the first program of in-sanatorium training for medical students.

“When I first went to Ninette, there was a big snowstorm,” says Annie. “I was even stormed in on the train… I forget exactly which town it was in, but [we were stuck there] until people came from Winnipeg to open up the tracks.”

During her months of service there, she was never afraid of contracting the disease since the facility trained the nurses to self-protect and sterilize.

She remembers that in the evenings, she and the other nurses would walk across the street to visit the local cemetery. While there, they’d read the scripture inscriptions on all the headstones.

Eventually, she moved on to Winkler to finish her nurse’s training and work in the hospital there. 

Family Life 

A few years later, she met her first husband at an event put on by mutual friends. They married in 1952. They were married for only six and a half years when he died in a tragic accident. Still in her twenties, she was left a single mother to raise their three daughters, Irene, Iris, and Ivy.

Two years later, she met her second husband at church. He was a recent widower with seven children of his own and significantly older than she was. They soon married and he became a doting father to her three girls.

Annie kept a few hobbies over those years, playing piano at church functions and baking cakes. On two occasions she came out with the winning entry in a radio baking contest with her made-from-scratch layer cakes.

She experimented for a long time before she mastered the perfect cake and her family quickly tired of the many practice cakes they were expected to eat, because in those days nothing was thrown away.

At the prompting of her married daughter Ivy, the couple eventually made Niverville their home. Merv and Ivy were raising four daughters of their own in the community at the time. Ivy, well-loved as a teacher to many Niverville students, lost a battle to cancer in 2017.

Again, Annie feels gipped. A daughter should never die before her mother, she says.

Annie enjoys relationships with her remaining daughters and step-children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, although many of them are spread out around the country and visits are few. 

“God Has Been Good to Me” 

In 2018, Annie’s new friend Orpha threw the second birthday party Annie had ever had—and this year she looks forward to returning to her friend’s home on Christmas day for a third.

Annie still owns a piano, but her eyesight prevents her from playing. In the morning, when her vision is a little better, she spends time reading her Bible.

At the seasoned age of 90, she lives with few medical issues and still manages quite independently on her own.

“God has been good to me,” Annie says. “Without Him I wouldn’t be here, because He’s really blessed me throughout my life.”