There are some pretty places in the world. Paris in the twilight. The English coast at mid-morning on a sunny day. Mexico at sunset. And, I've been told, Hawaii at pretty much any time of day.
But you have to admit, Saskatchewan in July is pretty darn pretty.
When the canola blooms and that gorgeous yellow contrasts with the green of other crops and the blue of the sky, you have to sigh and say to yourself, in our understated Saskatchewan way, "Yup, that's nice."
Yes, we do have mosquitoes the size of sparrows, but this year, it seems like the dragonflies are nearly as big. And we all may have spiders hanging off our houses like crazy this year, but they're catching mosquitoes, too, so you have to appreciate them a little bit.
And while we started this crop year with so much runoff, it looked like someone should have been building an ark over the winter, it did dry up enough for farmers to get into the fields, and early enough that they were able to plant that canola we love looking at so much.
We've had a bunch of rain in the past few weeks - every time I have time to cut my grass, it seems, we get another downpour - but if we don't get much more before harvest gets much closer, we could be okay for the fall. As long as there's not an early frost. Or a new kind of bug plague.
It's funny, when you talk about the landscape of Saskatchewan, and how pretty our corner of the world is, we invariably come back to agriculture. And even those of us who no longer live on farms like to use the term "we" when it comes to crops.
Because not many of us are very far removed from the farm. Some are. A friend of mine told me last week that she couldn't remember the last time she'd actually been on a farm. There is no one in her family right now that lives on one, and neither her parents nor her grandparents lived on one when she was growing up. She's a town kid, through and through. Which is pretty unusual on the prairies, you have to say.
I may not be a farmer, but I'm a farmer's daughter. And while I was never called on to drive a grain truck or a combine, I took plenty of meals out to the field in my little Chevy Cavalier, or the farm half-ton. I hauled plenty of bales in my day (well, before my brothers got big enough to take over). And I shovelled plenty of manure (and not just when writing essays in university). Though all of that was years ago, I still feel connected to the farm at a very basic level. And I don't think I'm alone in that.
There are plenty of people who see hail fall from the sky and their first thought is of the crops still in the field. Not about vehicles dented, or shingles that are damaged. Our first thought is about how that stupid hail is going to wreck those beautiful crops.
The same goes for an early frost.
Because in Saskatchewan, everyone is still affected by how the crops are. A lot of towns depend on farmers making money and spending it in their communities. Cities, too. When the farmers have a bad year, the rest of us are sure to follow.
Yes, our economy is getting more and more diversified. And yes, many of us are getting further and further away from the farm. But there is still a deep, visceral connection to the farm, underneath it all, I think. It's why many people immigrated here, after all - for the land, to farm what they owned themselves. (Or, as another friend put it, in a very blunt, Saskatchewan way, her ancestors came here instead of anywhere else "because they wanted free stuff.")
The land drew us here. And we're still tied to it. Even if we just like to admire it on a sunny, July day.
