I like to get down and get farmy.  I can’t help it.  It’s my heritage.  Most of you know, because I crow about it so.  I crow about being the great grand daughter and grand daughter of Saskatchewan wheat farmers.  Some of you also know that the reason I came home to Saskatoon in the month of June was to watch my grandparents receive their century farming award from the federal government of Canada.

Wowsers.  Can you imagine a farm being homesteaded and then farmed for an entire century?  It blows my mind.  At the award ceremony on Tuesday there were at least 60 families being honored with the century farming award and it was so fascinating to hear their stories.  Men came over to Canada, one hundred years ago, sometimes alone, sometimes with their young wives.  They came to Saskatchewan, wide open space, undeveloped countryside, stony plains, undulating prairie, herds of bison, cold winters, hot summers…  They homesteaded in a space where there was nothing.  They built homes from sod, some lived in the ground in excavated pits with grain shed roofs on top (to fully understand the hardship of this you’d have to experience a Saskatchewan winter).  They cleared land, they sowed seeds and harvested crops by hand.  Women bore children.  Some of the families honored were huge and boasted batches of offspring numbering fifteen or more!  People lived.  People died.  People suffered.  People were neighbors.  Barns were raised.  Communities were built.  A province was founded.

Some of these homesteads have stayed in the family (land has been passed down through the generations from fathers to sons) and are being farmed by the fourth or fifth generations now.  The magnitude of this heritage really hit me hard during the ceremony and I couldn’t help but cry a couple of times, especially with the thought that my grandparents had six daughters and the Thoen homestead will end with the generation my grandfather represents.

I want that farm.

I want its sloughs thick with geese in the fall.

I want the gravel pit, the outbuildings and that two story barn that sits on the lower part of the homestead.

I want the june bugs.

I want the strawberry patch.

I want the Quonset.

I want it all.

I want to carry on the legacy as a Thoen grand daughter.

I’ve always felt this, I’ve not voiced it to anyone by my parents and my husband (Robert wants the farm too) but after watching my grandparents receive their award, I can hear that desire pounding away in my heart stronger still.  It might come as a surprise to family members and friends who read this, but it’s true.

I want hundreds of acres.

Just the earth and I.

The wind and the northern lights.

:::A brilliant day here in Saskatchewan:::

I’ve got to get off my duff and stroll around a bit.

I love the places I’ve been.

I love the place I live.

But when I come home to Saskatchewan (FOREVER HOME)

I feel filled up and weepy at the strangest moments.

Nothing could be more delicious than a Saskatchewan summer.

It’s bliss truly.  A decadent yet practical gift from God.