Road Trip Krydor to Hafford Part 2

“…this country would always be populated with presences 

and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. 

The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, 

and of the world that is to come.” 

from Jayber Crow

by Wendell Berry

After our visit to Krydor we drove to Hafford about 21 km away.

A 2016 photo taken from outside the bistro in Hafford. 

These are typical prairie towns with beautiful skies and 
landscape that stretches off forever.

Hafford with a population of  360, still maintains the normal small town

businesses, a CO-OP, credit union, pharmacy, grocery etc. I noticed that

in 2017 the sign has been removed from this business I photographed 

in 2016 and it as been boarded up. Hafford does have a K to 12 school a 

vital link in maintaining community health. 

We also had to stop at the Hafford Ukrainian church, the distinctive

silhouettes of these churches are a beautiful feature of the 

Canadian prairie.

Photos of the church in Krydor taken in 2016 can be found here.

https://thatsjustthewildwood.blogspot.ca/search?q=krydor

An extensive article on Nykyta Budka can be found here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nykyta_Budka

“Some of the best things I have ever thought
 of I have thought of during bad sermons.”

from Jayber Crow
by Wendell Berry 

"All night, this soft rain from the distant past. 

No wonder I sometimes waken as a child."

from Starlight

by Ted Kooser

"It is the process of writing that urges the writer toward a poem’s 

most natural, most effective form. The decisions are best made en route."

from The Poetry Home Repair Manual

by Ted Kooser

Krydor 2016

“All the world, as a matter of fact, is a mosaic of little places invisible to the powers that be. And in the eyes of the powers that be all these invisible places do not add up to a visible place. They add up to words and numbers.” 

from Jayber Crow

by Wendell Berry

My wife and I enjoyed driving about the countryside this summer stopping in small towns and looking for birds. Just outside Krydor (the name is an amalgamation of parts of the names of two early founders) we stopped at this church. The first Ukrainian Services in Krydor started in 1921 in private homes, the present church appears to have been completed in 1945. The sign outside identifies it as the Ukrainian Orthodox Mission of St Peter and St Paul. The current town of Krydor (first postmaster 1918) has 25 residents. I did not take any photos of the town itself which I regret. There was small main street of a couple of blocks with a number of the small wood frame false front stores and businesses common in the Canadian prairies from 1900-1930's. All appeared to be boarded up, the only sign of activity a new super-mail box outside one building. I hope to go back next summer but for now here are photos of the church. There was one headstone from the 2000's and the grounds are well maintained.

"He sees that they are the dead, and they are alive. He sees that he lives in eternity as he lives in time, and nothing is lost. Among the people of that town, he sees men and women he remembers, and men and women remembered in memories he remembers, and they do not look as he ever saw or imagined them. The young are no longer young, nor the old old. They appear as children corrected and clarified; they have the luminous vividness of new grass after fire. And yet they are mature as ripe fruit. And yet they are flowers."

From Remembering

by Wendell Berry