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Manitoba
Lenore (the place) and more mosquitoes
July, 1997
Those who stick to the Trans-Canada highway miss a great deal. Here in Manitoba, as elsewhere on the prairies, are small towns and villages that could be right out of the imagination of some Edwardian writer. Small houses, each with a porch, scattered along a couple of tree-lined streets, so quiet in the summer afternoon that you can hear the hum of bees, the whine of dancing flies and the laugh of a child.
The countryside around them, far from being empty, is filled with hedgerows, grassy meadows, ponds and lakes on which ducklings struggle through water-lily flowers, tumbledown barns. Behind it all the ever-present sky, crushing the earth with thunderclouds, daubing it red with sunsets, and soaring above it, blue as a child's painting.
You can see rain showers plodding across the prairie many miles away. Most of them avoid us.
We visit Lenore, which is a real place, and almost miss the Spirit Dunes.