Home has a mixed connotation for me.  I love where I live in Kelowna, and I do consider that my home because now I would never move away from it. This is not where I consider my roots.  My roots are still stuck in Alberta on my grandparents farm.  As children we spent every weekend there driving quads, hanging out on the combines and watching the family working on the crops.  It was the best feeling to go out to the farm.  There was and still is no cell reception, and it is in the middle of no where.  This is where I feel most at home.  I feel like nothing can go wrong here,  I also enjoy myself there.  I am 100% happy there.  There is no other feeling like the farm.  It has been in my family’s possession for almost 100 years.  There was a gas station, a store, two homes, and a lot of family that grew up there.  And just across the road there is a Cemetery.  It is called New Kiew Ukrainian Church.  It is a small little church with so much character, I wish I had pictures of it. It is eerie to go to the church…No one is ever there to visit the grave sites so it is a little run down.  But there is a little cross in the back, that has the words Dyk (Duk in english)  carved into it. This is my uncle that died when he was a couple months old, he drowned in a little puddle of water… All the graves there are in Ukrainian. For me it is surreal to walk by them and read them, because many people could not read them, but I can.  Off the corner of the cemetery there is a little beaten path with three wooden crosses, nothing carved into them. No names, no dates, nothing is there.  This bothered me a lot so I did some research as to why they were so far away from the rest of the graves…it was the babies that died before they could be baptized, either abortions or miscarriages.  This made me so sad, because these poor children did not even have a chance to be baptized and they were shunned into the corner of the cemetery.  I just found this so unbelievable sad.  I cannot believe that innocent children were not allowed to even be buried on the property because the religion believed that anyone who was not baptized could taint the others who are buried there.  How unfair is that.

I feel so blessed that I had this opportunity to grown up in such an amazing area and have experiences that other people my age didn’t have.  For me having a massive amount of land to play on was unthinkable for my friends that lived in the city.  They had their little plot of grass and thats it.  I had more than my eyes could see.  Of course this got us into a lot of trouble at the same time.  Lots of broken bones and great memories that i would not trade for the world.  And for those reasons, the farm is my home, is it were I feel at peace with the world.