One of my happiest moments with regard to my rural past came when I was reading in Swift Current and eight or nine people, all retirees, who had been my neighbours when I first went into the Divide-Claydon area to live in the mid-seventies, came to hear me. I found them still a warm-hearted, lively bunch, and I was very touched to see them. I thank them also for reasons that go back to when I first met them and heard from my husband the stories of their families and their land, and learned from the women their forbearance and quiet resolution.
Juxtaposed with them are the urban people who in the late nineties began to move into Eastend. From them I saw in certain ways a re-enactment of my own efforts to come to terms with a local society that rarely bent to meet a newcomer halfway. They provided me with friendship and the return of an ease that I hadn’t felt in years. I thank all of them — those who stayed, and those who left — for this, and for bringing into such sharp focus the differences between rural/small-town and urban ways of seeing the world.
I thank also the Nature Conservancy of Canada people, who saw the possibility in Peter’s vision, and who fell as in love with the land as Peter and I were. Of these, John Grant was the first. Others were Wayne Harris, who sadly died shortly thereafter in a farm accident; the inimitable Lorne Scott; Conrad Olson; and Sue Michalsky, the first project manager. The first of the NCC board to visit was Elva Kyle, and many donors, beyond the peerless Weston family, came, and Jack Messer, then of SaskPower, a pivotal player in the fundraising and planning. I know that I will wake in the night as those names I’ve forgotten from twenty years ago return to haunt me and I ask forgiveness. Without them there would be no Old Man On His Back Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area.
In writing this memoir I have drawn on some of my other non-fiction books for information and inspiration: Coyote’s Morning Cry, Lilac Moon, The Perfection of the Morning, and Wild Stone Heart, in which the quotation from Greg Grace originally appeared, on page 129. I also quote a remark by J. M. Coetzee found in David Atwell’s J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (New York: Viking, 2015), on page 209.
Through all of these books, including this memoir, I have had the good fortune to work with editor Phyllis Bruce CM, to whom I owe tremendous gratitude for her brilliant editor’s eye, her expertise, and her unfailing wisdom. My agent, Jackie Kaiser, has been unflagging and invaluable in her perspicacity and her support. I thank them both.
My son, Sean Hoy, daughter-in-law, Carol, and my two grandchildren, Declan and Maeve, keep me on track. Sean, an actor and writer himself, has always supported me in my work, as I have tried to support him in his. My sisters, Cynthia and Deanna, themselves writers, have provided me with invaluable advice and encouragement, as did our youngest sister, Kathleen, to whom this book is dedicated. I cherish my close bond with our sister Sheila, who died in 1998. I thank all of them for their steadfastness and caring. Our mother, Margaret Amy (Graham) Le Blanc, still speaks in our ears every single day, and I thank her and acknowledge all the ways in which she shaped us. I thank, too, Peter’s mother, Alice Butala, especially for her example of bravery and innovativeness.