Barbara Reid

When I was a child, searching for something in my room, I’d eventually say, “I can’t find it!” and Mum would come into my room, say, “Open your big blue eyes…” and she’d quickly find whatever I was looking for. In later years, she would often lament that people don’t really look at things. They don’t really see. People tend to drive through our part of the prairie and say, “There’s nothing to see,” and Mum would say, with passion in her voice, “You have to look for the beauty here. It doesn’t come up and smack you in the face. You have to really look for it.” She and my Dad were good at looking for the beauty on our prairies. After retirement, they spent countless hours driving out on country roads, Dad with his camera with the telephoto lens, Mum acting as his “spotter”, and they’d come home with wonderful photographs of birds, animals, wildflowers, and equally wonderful stories of what they had seen, for they knew how to look and really see. Today, as I commemorate the first anniversary of Dad’s death (Mum died two months before him) I remember their delight in the things of nature, and their passion for the tiny evidences of beauty all around me, and I am grateful. And I find a message about writing in that.