Happy Prose-tober, Dear Readers!
Here at the Clayjar, we are feasting and foraging simultaneously. Each of us are delighting in the bounty of fruit we have found through God’s faithfulness in this season of our lives; at the same time, we are aware that there is still searching that needs to be done. Where, in the mundane, busy, and transitory stages of our lives, is His goodness and mercy? After all, a harvest season is not effortless. Autumn requires us to work alongside our thanksgiving. We seem to be keenly aware of this reality, so we are slowing down, setting the table, and inviting you all to a celebrate alongside us this month.
Each Sunday of October, we will be offering you a prose piece exclusively featured on Substack oriented around our summer theme, Rooted. We believe these pieces are meant to be shared and savored as a community. We believe in the power of place and belonging.
The candles are lit. The fine dishes are out. Let’s feast.
—
, EditorFinding Home
by
Riding a convoy of anticipation and uncertainty, we arrived in Alberta in 1999 just as August was shedding heat and Y2K was gaining momentum. Unlike previous moves, this new place contained no extended family, no memories connected to family, no personal history, nothing but the promise of work and the possibility of a future.
The newness was both a welcome novelty and an isolating reality.
Our initial settling in—squeezing all of us into a temporarily rented duplex, arranging utilities and health care, starting school and work—required much time and energy, so we had little of either left over to explore the physical landscape. It took several years of incremental excursions along the orderly grid of range and township roads and an oft-confusing meander of back roads and hiking trails for us to gain even a cursory knowledge of the region. Field and forest, vale and mountain, flowering meadow, flashing sea…Henry Van Dyke’s famous “Ode to Joy” bounces along on the melody to the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Substitute “wild rivers” for “flashing sea,” add a few are stacks and pump jacks, and his lyrics capture the essence of this land. Always enhanced by expressive prairie skies, a continual shift in colour and texture animates the land and propels it, not always gently, through the seasons.
The land is vast, but it is not empty. Even within a narrow radius of our house on the fringe of a small prairie town, creatures abound: waterfowl, frogs, songbirds, owls, hawks, muskrat, rabbit, squirrel, weasel, fox, coyote, deer. Moose have slept in our backyard, walked across our deck, and knelt to lick winter road salt from our vehicles in the driveway. From the beginning, I have tried to be an observant student of this place, learning when to expect the first frog song in spring, discovering where grouse roost under the snow, puzzling over the goose who laid her eggs in an eagle’s nest. The more I see and learn, the more I appreciate the rhythms of life here and the deeper my roots burrow into my backyard, the marsh, the fields, and the mountains guarding the western horizon. I have stepped “into the peace of wild things” and found solace.1
When I first started commuting 45 kilometers to teach school in another small prairie town, my route took me past numerous farms owned by Nameless Farmers. Like a settler arriving in a new land, I tried to establish a sense of place and belonging by naming landmarks along the way. Three large silos sprouting from the corner of a field became The Three Musketeers. A tidy row of eight matching grain bins squatting south of the road became the Butler Family. An old homesteader’s cabin half-buried in a gnarled mess of caragana shrubs became, somewhat predictably, Caragana House.
Years later, I still drive past those landmarks but rarely think of the names I imposed upon them. Instead, the names that orient me to the land now are those of the farm families whose children and grandchildren have sat in my classroom. I know the land in new ways because I’ve come to know these families, so deeply rooted in the soil and its seasons. This is another way of knowing a place: by a long habitation, a steady working and stewarding of the land, a passing of knowledge and skill to younger generations who willingly carry forward a passion for the land and utilize its riches to sustain life and families and legacies. Our twenty-five years on a larger-than-normal town lot is a mere pittance in this land patchworked together by generational family farms. I am clearly still a newcomer.
I remember how frayed and worn around the edges my life felt when we newly arrived, how raw and wary my heart was in the aftermath of discouragement and hurt. I wish I could say that living here has brought nothing but restoration and healing. I wish. But it has actually included unfathomable pain and fresh rounds of discouragements that have threatened to unravel those frayed edges completely. In 1999, I could never have anticipated that belonging to this place would include a grave in the local cemetery, that burrowing roots would mean burying a son in the ground. I never envisioned that life would sometimes feel like a full-blown prairie-style storm of Hard Things.
So it seems incongruent to say that I feel more content and at home here than any other place I have lived. But I think it is precisely these Hard Things that have deepened my appreciation for the seasonal blessing of wild roses blushing from roadside ditches and the ordinariness of pulling weeds and hanging laundry. Hard Things have a way of forcing us to plow deep, to develop strong roots that keep us from toppling over in despair and defeat. I understand in more grateful ways what it means to live in community even with its potential for messiness, to journey with others from a place of pain and heartache, to love generously and imperfectly, and to receive grace and generosity from others.
We came to this place out of necessity more than choice and over the years of making our home here, I have returned again and again to the name Immanuel, bestowed on Jesus to declare both his identity and his purpose. In this name, the Eternal God, Creator and Sustainer of a vast universe, declares His place of choice—with us.
I have found a home in this land of glorious sunrises and brutal windstorms, of baby birds and a buried son, of deep community and sin-fraught relationships, of opportunity and despair, of field and forest, of joy and sorrow, precisely because He is God With Us. He is with me.
About the author:
is an artist, writer, and semi-retired teacher. She enjoys exploring the northern Alberta prairies where she has lived for the past 26 years with her husband. Her art and writing reflect an appreciation for God’s grace in both the ordinary and the difficult moments of life. She has poetry and/or prose published by Fathom, The Way Back to Ourselves, Calla Press, and her own Substack:
Submissions for Bounty, our final issue of 2025, are open!
For this issue, we are looking for works that celebrate the bounty of our faith. We want works that are spilling over with harvests in all seasons, fruits that are vibrant and flavorful, and just plain gratitude for the good and perfect gifts we have been given by God. We want this issue to be a festival that commemorates the extravagant generosity of our God and the ways in which we get to sow as lavishly as we reap.
Our submission window is open from September 21st until November 2nd. You can find all of our guidelines here and submit below.
Gratefully,
The Clayjar Masthead
Berry, Wendell. “The Peace of Wild Things.” The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, Counterpoint, 1998, p.30.
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So beautifully written! I found the connection of painful experiences with the establishment of roots very insightful and helpful. Thank you for this.
as a neighbour to the east of Alberta (MB), i felt the beautiful and difficult descriptions of this prairie scenery keenly. i especially loved the knitting together of hectares, roots and time as "patchwork." it's both hard-earned and quite lovely! and thank you Clayjar for pairing this with a painting from the Group of Seven! it's always a delight to see those! :) <3