Deena from Shoes to Shiraz {Guest Post}

Hi Katie's people!!! I thrilled to be guest posting today on Mishaps and Mayhem and gotta say, I am very much looking forward to meeting Katie some day, she is a great blogging friend! I am super intrigued to learn more about Long Island and where Katie is from...in fact, I have a Long Island cutting board sitting on my counter, courtesy of Katie. Some day I hope to visit her world.

My name is Deena and like Katie, I am a Catholic educator. I teach High School French and Christian Ethics in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a city of 225,000. I live in the middle of the prairies in a province whose population is only one million, but the size of our province is twice the size of Texas. We are blanketed in many feet of snow in our cold winters and in the summer we are surrounded by the golden fields of canola and purple fields of flax. Our skies reach from one horizon to the other. Saskatchewan is truly a beautiful place.

Why would I chose to live in a place smack dab in the middle of nowhere, where the temperature can range from +40 to -40? Where there are 4 seasons, but mostly winter? Where the biggest city (1 million +) is a 6 hour drive away? I get that it may not sound appealing, but to me it's more than that. It's my home. It is where the majority of my friends and family live. I would have a very hard time moving somewhere mainly for that fact: our parents are a short hourish drive away. My friends live within 20 minutes and soon one will live across the road! It would be so lonely without them. Who would have beer and clam with me on the deck? Who would go to movies with me? I was born and raised in Saskatchewan and I am proud to call this beautiful farming province home. It is where my Grandparents settled, farmed (somewhat) and raised their families. The highways are lined with the golden yellow fields of canola and purple flax in the summer. In the autumn, the patchwork quilt of land are lit up with golden hues. The winter can be beautiful too with the pastel shades and northern lights. This province, built on hard work and pioneering souls is a beautiful place to live. Saskatchewan has a total area of 651,900 square kilometres (251,700 sq mi). Just to help my American friends picture the size, Texas is 268,820 square miles (696,200 km2). So we're similar in size, but there's a huge difference, we have close to 1.2 million people. Texas? 26 million.                       I will always remember what Valerie, a friend from Belgium, living in Sask for a summer said on her visit. She was so amazed by the sky; she said she had never seen the sky so panoramic and so alive. That's one of the biggest draws to me: the space, the sky, the simple beauty. While I have lived in many places in my little life: Prince Albert, where I was born and raised, Montreal, where I did an exchange in high school, Regina and Quebec City, where I went to University, finally it is in Saskatoon where Dan and I decided to set up shop. I am proud to call Saskatoon my home. I love that Saskatoon is still a "big" city, by Sask standards, but still small city enough that it only takes me 30 minutes to drive across the city to bring Willis to school. And we live 10 minutes out of town. I am proud to be a Canadian Prairie Girl. I love that we're kinda in the middle of everywhere so we can visit coast to coast for travel. I love that I can have good shopping and great restaurants and that they are never crazy crowded. I love going away and visiting other cities and every single time I'm about to come home I get so excited to be back to the incredible skylines and fresh air of Saskatchewan. I love where I live. And really, the only way you could get me to move is by packing up my friends and family too. And the sky and the northern lights and the lakes and the geese and the moose and the snowdrifts and the sunsets. I think it's important to love where you live, don't you? What makes you proud of your home?