Little Landscape Memories
Places that feel like home. An ode to our roots.
Little Landscapes are painted from childhood memories.
When I think about my childhood on the farm, there are images that flash through my mind, mostly of the seasons across wide open fields at a time when it felt like we lived in the middle of nowhere. Yes, technically, we were only a mile and a half from town, but for a kid who was stuck out there with just her sister for company, it felt very far.
The images that flash through my mind when I flip back in time are those of gravel roads, old barns and telephone lines. I peddled my bike to our neighbours across the creek to play dominoes at their kitchen table. We walked the fence lines every spring, bucket of staples and hammer in hand, to repair the loose sections before the cows went back to pasture. We cruised those gravel roads when we got our licenses, dust flying, windows rolled down and radio blaring, feeling very mature and super cool. On long drives, we counted train cars and telephone poles and sometimes played “cows” where we competed to find the next herd before someone else saw it, minus points if you called cows too early and it was horses.
I suppose as I sift back through my memories, like flipping through an old photo album, the edges are slightly creased and the colours faded, but the feeling of that place and time remains as vivid as ever. The way the sky felt big and the road felt long stuck with me wherever I went after I left that farm. My mom sent me off to college with a photo of a canola field so I would remember what it was like when I felt homesick. I hung that up in my dorm room alongside my posters and remembered not just where I grew up, but the family that made that childhood a good one.
Home stays will us always. Every time I make a turn off the main highway, back to gravel, the nostalgia hits. Maybe times were simpler then. Maybe its the way time feels like it has snuck up on me and that childhood that still feels to near drifts farther into the rearview mirror.
Whatever it is, I love opening the pages of those memories, revisiting the places that still feel like home and realizing how much that middle of nowhere feels like somewhere special. Home.
