The winter light of the prairies is ethereal, pure, intoxicating.  Colours are gentle and features meld into one other with an occasional certain line of shadow to give you ground.   It is hard to imagine where you are in the line of time.  You are suspended somewhere between the heavens and the earth, between ancient history and four o'clock this day in the afternoon.

It must have been days like these that my grandparents remembered while they had returned to Ontario for two years to help my suddenly widowed great-grandmother in Grey County.  I have read of the unimaginable hardships of the dry grasslands homesteader, the soddys leaking for days after a torrential downpour, the isolation, plagues of insects and vicious prairie blizzards.  Yet, they made the decision to come home to this place.   Perhaps it was the amazing light, or the hundreds of thousands of spring crocuses and the summer tiger lilies, the waterfall song of the meadowlark and the brilliant flash of bluebirds.