All The Things I Never Say...About Manitoba :)

I’ve spent a long time…missing out

on this place and missing

     that place.

Always full of what I’ve lost and never filling

Up

     on what I’ve gained

What wasn’t before.

I can feel cold

     so cold it makes me gasp,

the sun dogs shine,

my coat creak,

and my hair turn instant icicles.

The discovery of a nostricle.

Turbulent oceans of snow stretch to the white edged sky;

making it difficult to distinguish the horizon.

And as much as I’ve wondered

I’ve tired.

of this cold, of the white,

of looking for trees

- when before they were just all around.

Enveloping me in green.

Green rises in the land late spring.  Crops poking their heads through dark

soil moist from melted snows.

Such relief I never felt when winter was so brief.

The greening of these hillocks

     lifts me.

Spring is messy here, I can dwell on that.

but I need to stop.

I’ve stopped my complaint over the heat and bugs

and sticky moisture of summer.

There is too little summer and spring and fall here

to bemoan a thing about the season.

I think I have been spoiled in a land of easy beauty.

To really have to see here takes finer senses.

It isn’t

as if

I haven’t

marveled at these machines

that crawl the countryside

that dig deep and turn

and feed millions of people;

    one person doing the work of many men.

A haze on the horizon from the dust of spring planting,

The dust in the air from harvest combining.

The winds that scathe this land;

the reason for the trees that have been planted.

Keep us sheltered

keep us from blowing over

keep the soil from barreling over

the Gulf of Mexico.

Keep the snows piled at bay.

The problem lies deep in me.

There really is no mistake that God has made.

It isn’t a fault in this place so much as

my resistance

to accepting.

Accepting this is where I must lay down my roots.

Taken up from western places

and western faces

     - cherished

I must reach down and bury my feet

and let arms sink into such

open and exposed places.

Take it as my own.

     while feeling like an intruder

because I struggle to understand

the beauty.

Looking through the wrong lenses

this place looks threatening

but this is my home.

I have kept myself from getting too close.