Tomorrow I will be the chicken lady for a week or so; with my husband working long days, it's up to me to give the birds their water and gather our eight daily eggs. Today I went out with him to learn the routine and was amused to find myself wearing oversized rubber boots along with my other home gear; quite a change from the professional image I will again have to resume tomorrow, as school recommences post-February break.

Wandering out to the chickens put me in mind of what I think of as the Warman years. When I was in university in Saskatoon, before I was married, my parents bought an acreage just outside of Warman, Saskatchewan. They lived there for four years. Each day, Dad and I would do the commute to Saskatoon, I to go to U. of S. and he to his job with the Canadian government. He was in suit and tie; I wore the uniform of public schools past and present, blue jeans. I recall those drives as companionable. The acreage had 80 acres, mostly unused, but near the house (which was a lovely rancher with lots of room for we six kids and our friends, plus a couple of boarders) was a classic red barn and a chicken coop. Dad became a 'gentleman farmer'. I think it was a déjà vu of sorts for him, too; he'd mucked out barns and fed animals on his Uncle Fraser's farm, while in high school and university, and now he and Mother kept a few cows for milk, some goats in a famous experiment, chickens and turkeys. Those were, I might add, the best turkeys I would ever eat until Bern and I kept turkeys ourselves, many years later, on our acreage north of Fort St. John.

I think it was really relaxing for Dad to keep those few animals, for him and Mother to go to the auction every Saturday and bid for this and that (Mother almost single-handedly kept the Baha'i community of Saskatoon in fruits from the auction). I didn't pay much attention to the whole farming deal: I was pretty busy with school and with an active social life. But we all now recall those as happy years. My sister Andrea was married on that farm; our late aunt Joyce commented that it was the only wedding she'd ever been to where you had to step over the cowpies to get to the ceremony. It was a gorgeous wedding; Andrea was just short of 18, and she and her husband are now happy parents and grandparents. We became very close to the people who would visit us at the farm, or who lived there for a time; Lorenzo, Edward, Bruce, David, Vicky, Pam, Wilf & Rita and many others became dear friends and remain so to this day. I wonder, sometimes, if that's the time during which I fell in love with the prairies. Probably.

So here time has come almost full circle and my husband and I have an acreage, and I am the one, for the next few days at least, to go out to the chickens and gather their eggs. This spring Bern will start raising turkeys and meat birds, and increase the number of layers...Sometimes our home near Richard, Sk feels a lot like when I was younger and lived near Warman, Sk which is, after all, just a long stone's throw down the road. I could not have imagined, then, that I would come back to these roots, nor that the intervening years would take me to so many places I'd never been before, and to so many new friends, but in remembering, I am grateful. I'm grateful for then, and I'm grateful for now, and this week, Dad will be eating farm fresh eggs for breakfast as he awaits his 80th birthday on this year's St. Patrick's Day. Who'd a thunk it?