Regina, the Queen City

Last month, I attended an uncle's funeral in Regina, Saskatchewan. When I was a kid, I spent a fair amount of time in Regina due to having many relatives living in and around the city, so I consider Regina part of my old stomping grounds.

It's fashionable nowadays in certain quarters to make fun of Regina, but that city takes great pride in staying true to its prairie location and history. I admire that. And Regina has made real strides in the past few years to become a more attractive and urbane city, while still remaining a very down-to-earth kind of place. 

For example, you gotta love a place where the local pro football team's mascot is a gopher, fer gawd's sake! Meet Gainer the Gopher of the Saskatchewan Roughriders --

Its junior pro hockey team, the Regina Pats, is the oldest such hockey franchise in the world. The team was named for Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the armed forces regiment based in the prairie provinces. (That's the regiment my father served with in World War II.)

On the national scene, Regina is perhaps best known for its police academy, the RCMP Depot Division, where all Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers have been trained since 1885.

While I was in Regina, I spotted a lovely floral and topiary display near the provincial legislature grounds. True to Regina's no-nonsense sensibilities, the topiary was not of some mythological fantasy creature or hoity-toity classical form, but instead celebrated that most humble and ubiquitous presence of rural prairie life, the grasshopper --

[Photo © Debra She Who Seeks, August 2021]

I dedicate this post to my blogging buddy, The Blog Fodder, a retired agricultural consultant who was born, raised and spent his career in Saskatchewan, but who now lives and writes in Ukraine with his wife Tanya. As he once wryly noted in an early post, Tanya is "the only woman in Ukraine who doesn't want to emigrate to Canada," so he moved there instead. He recently spent a couple of years back in Regina undergoing some serious medical treatment, but all is well now and he's back home in Ukraine. His blog is definitely worth checking out!