Memory in Saskatchewan

I just came back from Canada’s only rectangular province. I was there to help out my 95-year-old mother while her main caregiver took vacation. It’s an unhappiness that my family has splashed itself across Canada in such a way that we have to get on an airplane (or take drives measured in days) to see each other, but that’s where we are. I came back with pictures and stories.

Let me set the stage with a couple of photos. Everyone knows that Saskatchewan is flat and brown and empty, right?

Mom lives in Regina, the provincial capital, a city built round a huge park that contains the Legislature (the flowers are from its front lawn), a sizeable lake, and an artificial mini-mountain (the water and trees are from its tip). Have no fear, I’ll get to some no-kidding prairie landscapes.

Health-care drama · The night I arrived, after my Mom went to bed she got up again, tripped on something and fell hard. Her right arm was swollen, bruised, and painful. The skin and adjacent blood vessels of very old people become thin and fragile; her whole forearm was a bruise. I tried to get her to go to Emergency but she wasn’t having any of it: “You wait for hours and then they give you a pain-killer, which is constipating.” Since she could twist her wrist and wiggle her fingers and give my hand a firm grasp, I didn’t push too hard.

A couple days later on Saturday she got her regular twice-a-week visit from the public HomeCare nurse, a friendly and highly competent Nigerian immigrant, to check her meds and general condition. She looked at Mom’s wrist and said “Get her an appointment with her doctor, they’ll probably want an X-Ray.”

I called up her doctor at opening time Monday. The guy who answered the phone said “Don’t have any appointments for a couple weeks but come on over, we’ll squeeze her in.” So we went in after morning coffee and waited less than an hour. The doctor looked at her arm for 45 seconds and said “I’m writing a prescription for an X-Ray” and there was a radiologist around the corner and she was in ten minutes later. The doctor called me back that afternoon and said “Your mother’s got a broken wrist, I got her an 8AM appointment tomorrow at Regina General’s Cast Clinic.”

The doctor at the clinic looked at her wrist for another 45 seconds and said “Yeah, put on a cast” so they did and we were home by ten. I’d pessimistically overpaid a couple bucks for hospital parking.

The reason I’m including this is because I notice that this space has plenty of American readers. Did you notice that the story entirely omits insurance companies and money (except parking)? In Canada your health-care comes with your taxes (granted, higher than Americans’) and while the system is far from perfect, it can fix up an old lady’s broken wrist pretty damn fucking quick without any bureaucratic bullshit. Also, Canada spends a huge amount less per head on health-care than the US does.

And Mom told me not to forget that Saskatchewan is the birthplace of Canadian single-payer universal healthcare. Tommy Douglas, the Social Democrat who made that happen, has been named The Greatest Canadian.

Gentle surface · Oh, did I say “flat and brown and empty”? Wrong, wrong, and wrong. The Prairies, in Canada and the US too, have textures and colors and hills and valleys, it’s just that the slopes are gentle. There are really flat parts and they make farmers’ lives easier, but more or less every square inch that’s not a town or a park is farmed. I took Mom for a drive out in the country southeast of Regina, from whence these views:

In Canada that yellow-flowering crop is called “Canola”, which Wikipedia claims refers to a particular cultivar of Brassica napus, commonly known as rapeseed or just rape, so you can see why when Canada’s agribiz sector wanted to position its oil as the thing to use while cooking they went for the cultivar not the species name. I’m old enough to remember when farmers still said just “rapeseed”. Hmm, Wikipedia also claims that the OED claims this: The term “rape” derives from the Latin word for turnip, rāpa or rāpum, cognate with the Greek word ῥάφη, rhaphe.

Let’s stick with canola.

Pixelated color · After I’d taken those two canola-field shots I pulled out my Pixel and took another, but I’m not gonna share it because the Pixel decided to turn the sky from what I thought was a complex and interesting hue into its opinion of “what a blue sky looks like” only this sky didn’t.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think Google’s camera app is becoming increasingly opinionated about color, and not in a good way. There are plenty of alternative camera apps, I should check them out.

In case it’s not obvious, I love photographing Saskatchewan and think it generally looks pretty great, especially when you look up. On the province’s license plates it says “Land of living skies”, and no kidding.

Experience and memory · My Mom’s doing well for a nonagenerian. She’s smart. When I visited early last fall and we talked about the US election I was bullish on Kamala Harris’s chances. She laughed at me and said “The Americans won’t elect a woman.” Well then.

But she’s forgetful in the short term. I took her to the Legislature’s garden and to the top of the mini-mountain and for a drive out in the country and another adventure we’ll get to; she enjoyed them all. But maybe she won’t remember them.

“Make memories” they say, but what if you show someone you love a good time and maybe they won’t remember it the next day? I’m gonna say it’s still worthwhile and has a lesson to teach about what matters. There endeth the lesson.

The gallery · Indigenous people make up 17% of Regina’s population, the highest share in any significant Canadian city. By “indigenous” I mean the people that my ancestors stole the land from. It’s personal with me; Around 1900, my Dad’s family, Norwegian immigrants, took over some pretty great farmland southeast of Edmonton by virtue of “homesteading”, such a nice word isn’t it?

Regina tries to honor its indigenous heritage and my favorite expression of that is its Mackenzie Art Gallery, a lovely welcoming space in the T.C.Douglas building (for “T.C.” read “Tommy”. (Did I mention him?) Mom and I walked around it and had lunch in its very decent café.

Every time I’ve been there the big exhibitions in the big rooms have been indigenous-centered, and generally excellent. I try to go every time I visit and I’ve never been disappointed.

In 2025, anything I have to say about this piece would be superfluous.

I love modern-art galleries, especially with big rooms full of big pieces, even if I don’t like all the art. Because it feels good to be in the presence of the work of people who are pouring out what they have to offer, especially at large scale. If the task wasn’t hard enough that failures are common then it wouldn’t be worthwhile, would it?

They’re especially great when there’s someone I love there enjoying it with me. Here’s Mom.

These days, any visit might be the last. I hope this wasn’t.

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