Gifts

One afternoon this week, feeling melancholy and missing Maya, Gerry and I went to the Wakamow Valley and walked to the place where, once upon a time in my childhood, there was a wild animal park. I’ve wanted to find that spot since last summer when we visited Moose Jaw and made the decision to move.

My memories of the place are foggy—a poor lion in a cement bottom cage, monkeys, and a big red barn with a slide from the pseudo “hayloft” to the ground outside (my clearest memory of that is of being scolded by bigger kids behind me for taking too long).

It was windy afternoon Gerry and I were there, and cemented my resolve to get a hat—a first ever, but I am a prairie girl now and it seems necessary. (It arrived yesterday and it’ll do the trick for keeping my hair from flying everywhere and obstructing my vision  in the Sasky wind). We enjoyed the walk, and will return to explore on a day that’s not quite to breezy.

Yesterday, I drove a couple of hours to Saskatoon where my bestie from Kamloops is visiting her family. Oh, what a sweet time we enjoyed together. It was as if a week had passed between visits instead of six months. Friends like that are rare and priceless gifts. We didn’t capture any photos. We were too busy talking. 🙂

In the garden, green things are just barely starting to make themselves known in the new raised garden beds. Tiny green tomatoes are forming on plants that grow bigger every day. Cucumber plants seem to reach farther every time I look at them and, in less encouraging news, I think leaf miners are decimating my first sowing Swiss chard and starting in on the first green bean plants. This is a new pest to me, and one I just realized might be the culprit. I’ll be out in the garden surveying the situation and doing damage control today after church if it doesn’t rain, which it seems likely to.

And so, I’m taking a deep breath on this Sunday, the first day of a new week according to the calendar hanging in my office, and stepping forward into whatever awaits. But first, the gift and grace of gathering and worshiping with our St. Aidan family where we will be both fed and commissioned to go forth into the week and the world and share what sustains us.