Looking out across the miles of farmland you can see where the saying “You can watch your dog run away for three days” comes from.  

Located North of Warner, and joining with Highway 4, this prairie road holds a special place in my heart. I remember it first as a Alberta Wheat Pool calendar that was in the Grade 3/4 classroom at the Masinasin School.

If you are old enough you will remember those calendars, a big (well by a nine-year-old’s perspective anyway) piece of cardboard, with a painting of some Alberta scene and the months on a pad of paper stapled at the bottom center of the calendar.

I don’t know why it made such an impression at the time. I can still see it clearly nearly 60 years later. It hung on the wall just to the right of a stand that held books and magazines. The stand was in the corner of the room where Louise Miller taught somewhere around 20 of the local farm kids Grade 3 and Grade 4. It might have been when she pointed out that the scene was local.

If I remember correctly, at the time there were somewhere between 80-100 students between Grade 1 and Grade 8 that attended Masinasin. All were farm kids that lived east of Verdigris Coulee. But I digress.

Missing from this photo is the farmstead that used to be located down at that first intersection. It wasn’t until much later I found out that old homestead that no longer exists belonged to my Great-Grandmother, and that my Mom spent her summers playing in that farm yard. She would let off the Greyhound where the road intersected with the highway and then walk down to the farm.

My next memory is from one day when we were making one of our few trips to Lethbridge, that Dad turned off the highway and onto this road to show us where Great-Grandma used to live. The farm had long been abandoned and Grandma, as we knew her, had moved to Lethbridge to live. At the time I didn’t make the connection between the road and the calendar.

It actually wasn’t until just a couple of years ago, when I was taking Mom to one of her many doctor’s appointments in Lethbridge that she pointed out the intersection and said that was were Grandma Frandsen’s farm had been located and all the pieces fell together in my memory.

My plan is to make a series of photos that depict the road in Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter.  This photo was done on June 24, (my Dad’s birthday) so it’s officially the summer photo. It’s been raining on a regular basis all spring so everything is still nice and green.