Sue Hamilton had no experience farming but plenty with new beginnings when she and her husband Bill moved to his family’s property in the Pontiac to try their hand at starting a sod business.

It was the late ‘70s, and Sue and Bill had already been dating for several years when Bill convinced her to pack up her city life in Ottawa and swap it for growing grass in Quyon. 

They sowed their first 13 acres in 1977, and almost doubled their acreage the following year, the same year they married.

“So [Dad] quit school, they got married, and moved out here,” said their son Jared Hamilton, seated next to his younger sister Lindsay Hamilton at a conference table in the office of the family business – Mountainview Turf – which they now run together. 

“Our father is a dreamer by nature. [Mom] was more of the stable, grounded [one] of the two of them,” Lindsay explained. 

“I think it’s likely Dad came up with 50 ideas and mom’s knocking them down as time went on,” she laughed. 

“She was not an on-a-whim type of woman. She was structured and she planned and she really thought things out. So I think for Dad to be able to persuade her, she must have thought, ‘You know what, this could actually work.’”

It was an afternoon in late August, and the Hamilton siblings were taking a couple of hours off work to reflect on the person their mother had been and the life she had led. 

Sue passed away in early August, at the age of 67, after a 19-month battle with colon cancer,  leaving a large hole in the community she had given so much to in the four decades since she and Bill first moved out to the farm. 

Her funeral, held at the Wesley United Church in Beechgrove, was evidence of this. 

“I know I sound biased because she’s my mother, but there were a lot of people at her funeral, more than I’ve ever seen in that church, inside, outside, and in the basement,” Lindsay said. 

“And most didn’t know her story, so when the minister started getting to her story [ . . . ] there were gasps from people who didn’t understand where she had come from, and what she had built.” 

To strangers, there are obvious indicators of all that Sue built – her business, her church community, her family – but the structure and stability that Sue had methodically erected into her own life to set herself on a different course than her childhood had determined was clear only to those who knew her past, and all that she had done to not become its victim. 

Born in a small fishing village on Nova Scotia’s South shore, Susan Emily Earl had not yet lived a decade before her life was turned on its head.

Her mother died in a plane crash when she was only nine years old, leaving Sue, her younger brother and two younger sisters in the care of her mother’s family for a summer. When her father returned from his job hunt he moved them to Sackville, N. B., severing her connection with her mother’s side of the family.  

But the move to Sackville wasn’t the only time Sue would be uprooted. She spent her childhood hopping from town to town across the maritimes, moving to wherever her father found work. 

When her father remarried, bringing four more children into the household, the family moved into his wife’s house, which had only two bedrooms for 10 people, leaving Sue and her sisters sleeping in a damp, unfinished basement. 

“Her father was a very mean individual, very cruel, and she had a very rough upbringing with him being so cruel. [With] alcohol abuse in the picture as well, [ . . . ] and being one of the oldest of his children, he put a lot of responsibility on her shoulders,” Lindsay said. 

When Sue was 13 years old, her father moved the family once again, this time to North Gower, Ont. This was the last time Sue would allow herself to be uprooted, without her choosing it. 

Three years later, her father was, predictably, ready to move the family again, this time to British Columbia. But Sue did not go, a decision that was a turning point in her life. 

“She got so tired of it that she just was like, ‘I’m done. I’m staying here.’ And she did, she just said goodbye to her family and emancipated from them,” Lindsay said. 

From then on, Sue was the director of her own life. At 16 years old, she was living on her own, paying her own bills while trying to complete high school. It was around that time she met her  future husband Bill Hamilton, and the two quickly became inseparable. Once they graduated high school (after a quick stint in summer school), it wasn’t long before they were making plans to start a sod farm on Bill’s family property outside Quyon. 

In 1978, when Sue was 21 years old, she and Bill moved to Quyon permanently to start Mountainview Turf, landing, finally, in what would become her forever home.

Lindsay and Jared had nothing but good things to say about their childhood. Their parents worked hard – Bill as the face of the business, and Sue doing all of the behind-the-scenes work needed to keep it running, while also raising their two children. 

“Dad jokes still to this day, that the only reason that Jared and I turned out somewhat decent, which is arguable, is the fact that Mom did a lot of the upbringing,” Lindsay said. 

While Sue was undoubtedly juggling many different balls, her children never remembered her being absent from their lives when they were young, aside from the few years she was busy launching the family’s second business, Gemma Property Services, in Ottawa. 

“As a kid, it was just steady. It was routine. You know, cropping in the fall and harvesting and busy seasons of May and June. I don’t remember them ever saying we’re not going to make it or anything like that,” Jared said.

“If [Mom] had any baggage from being a kid, I never knew. I never knew anything but love and trust and being in a safe place.”

“I think she wanted so much to be able to have kids and watch us grow up and give us a different childhood than she did,” Lindsay said.

She recalled, shuddering with embarrassment, when her mom would shout ‘I love you’ out the car window when dropping her off at school, only to realize later on how important it was for her mother to be able to say those words. 

“Maybe her mother [said it], but she doesn’t ever remember anybody, not her father, her whole life, ever saying, ‘I love you.’ And so she overdid that with us a lot to make sure that we knew,” Lindsay said. 

Sue’s determination to make the people around her feel loved was not limited to her immediate family, it also extended to those she and Bill hired to work on the farm and in the office. 

“Very early on I learned not to tell Sue I liked things, because she would get it for you,” remembered Jillian Young, who Sue hired out of the blue for an office accounting job when she had just finished college. 

“I told her very early on that one of my favourite things for lunch was dill cheese, and every time she did groceries for two years, I would get a block of cheese with dill on my desk,” she said. 

Jillian, who was working a job in the city she hated, and who had no accounting experience at the time she was hired by Sue, still remembers the relief it was to be seen and embraced by her.

“I just remember the look in her eyes. Like, ‘Duh, I can teach you that, you’re smart.’”

Sue was very involved in deciding which ministers would be brought to lead the congregation of the Quyon Pastoral Charge, which moved between the Quyon United and Wesley United churches. 

“Sue was really good at figuring out who would fit our congregation,” said Jillian, a longtime member of the charge, noting finding this good fit for a rural church was not an easy task, especially when the charge became a learning site for new ministers. 

“They have to take a lot of criticism. We’re supposed to be teaching them how to be a minister, so we’re sort of encouraged as a congregation to give them feedback and to criticize,” Jillian said. 

“Sue was more their safe space. She would protect them, make them feel so welcome, and so loved. I think it speaks a lot of Sue that four of our past ministers were at her funeral, and all spoke about how she made them feel at home here.”

Jillian said it was also important to the congregation that the ministers be musical. 

“We’re a church that loves to sing,” she said, describing how Sue’s voice would often be the loudest of them all, giving others the courage to join in. “Sue was our singing leader. I don’t know what we’re going to do without her. She led us.” 

Eddie McCann, one of the first locals to befriend Bill and Sue when they moved to the area, also spoke highly of Sue’s leadership in the community. 

“Quality, for sure, is a quick word that comes to mind. Sincere. Very strong in her faith and in her family. Very serious. If she said something would be done, it happened. She was a community leader, and she was a doer, for sure,” he said. 

“She wasn’t one to preach to you, to say you shouldn’t do this or that. But certainly she set good examples.” 

Sue also had a dedication to bringing a lightness to her world – a goofy side that came out in her love for joking around and for dressing up for Halloween. 

Jared recalled how on one occasion, his parents had some friends over and they ended up eating all of the KFC chicken out of their fridge. As payback, Sue placed a ‘Wanted’ ad in THE EQUITY, to try and track down the chicken thieves. 

For Jared’s high school graduation, she brought a mannequin woman dressed with makeup to his photo shoot.

“She told everybody that this is what her and Dad had got in case I couldn’t get a date,” Jared laughed. 

This levity, for Lindsay and Jared, was evidence of their mother’s determination to never become the victim of her own story. 

“I think sometimes we use things that happen to us in life as an excuse to get out of something, or an excuse to hide from something. She had this past, and she had such humble beginnings, but she didn’t let that shape her,” Lindsay said. 

“She decided to change the trajectory of her life. A little girl from Nova Scotia who could not even afford anything in life, who got beat around as a kid . . . and then to create such a legacy through us, through the businesses and through the community, I think it’s very telling that it doesn’t matter how your story started, it matters how your story ended.” 

Later in life, Sue and Bill returned to Nova Scotia and reconnected with the family from which she had for so long been estranged, eventually buying a property out there, down the road from where she grew up. Sue and Bill ended up spending a lot of time here once their involvement with the business slowed down.

“Through days and weeks and months and years of little conversations and people dropping in and visits and kitchen parties, because it’s Nova Scotia, she really was able to reconnect with family down there and heal,” Jared said. 

“Resentment, anger, those are easy emotions to have. It is so easy to be mad at the world. It is so, so easy. It takes true strength to forgive and love.” 

Sue’s approach to her own life is maybe best captured in another one-liner she would often shout out the window while dropping Lindsay off at school. 

“‘Go create a great day!’” Lindsay recalled her mom yelling after her. At the time, it drove Lindsay nuts, but in retrospect, she realizes the power in her mother’s belief that each person has the ability to be the authors of their own lives. 

“She wanted to create great days every day.”