Prairie skies reach even the biggest city hearts

Whoever it was who biasedly referred to people living in small towns as inexperienced, unworldly or sheltered from real life must have been a New Yorker — because my experiences over the last few months have proved that theory otherwise.

Being raised in Toronto, I had the big city at my fingertips.

I went to professional hockey, baseball, basketball, lacrosse and soccer games, watched plays and concerts performed in massive amphithetres, and sipped lattés with the best of them on Bay Street.

Okay, so I'm a city girl — I'm spoiled, I wear make-up and heels to the grocery store, I relate more to synthesized songs by Lady Gaga than the soulful Gretchen Wilson. I don’t know how to two-step and I’ve never witnessed the birth of a calf.

It's been nearly one year since I moved to Swift Current last July, and every day I’ve spent here, I’ve learned something new or experienced something I’ve never before had the opportunity to do.

I attended a community-wide Halloween dance at the hall in Maple Creek, went snowmobiling for the first time on a frozen lake, volunteered at the local live theatre and SPCA, and spent my very first night camping in a tent surrounded by the evergreens of Cypress Hills Park.

If I’ve learned anything of importance so far, it’s that there is nothing more spectacular than gazing up at the huge open Prairie sky in pitch-black darkness in the middle of nowhere.

Big-city skylines are bombarded by bright lights, skyscrapers and smog, and I’d bet most people who live there have never really seen the expansive sky stretching far beyond the rooftops.

Stars are as big and as bright here as you'd imagine flaming balls of gas to be, and there are millions more up there than the selective few that make up the small and large dippers that can be seen from anywhere.

There is something to be said about small-town education as well. My high school graduating class was of 400 students, and even after four years, none of the teachers remembered my last name — never mind how to pronounce it.

We never skated or learned how to curl in gym class, and field trips were always too much work for teachers to organize.

People seem happy here, which is something of a rare find back in Toronto. They aren't rushing around or stressed out, and spending time with family actually means more to them than gathering around the flat screen television set Thursday nights.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to knock big-city living. It, of course, has its perks as well. However, I feel I must admit my former Toronto-esque naivéty had me convinced that there was no way one year here, not the many years in Toronto, could open my eyes to the world.

I was wrong.