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An auto parts store can be not quite like others in urban centres. You are likely to be trusted to pay for the work and if you want to save some money, go down the street and pay for the part yourself. Do you come from an eastern city where on occasion it could cost you for driving onto the lot and you devise ways to avoid paying unreasonable fees. Here, not paying is not an option. You and the part are connected as soon as the order for a repair is made. On top of that no one is hoping to get rich off a sucker like you. Maybe a few extra minutes spent cleaning a rim, but it's value for money and neighbourliness. The price of a tie rod, for example, might not be more than, say, that in friendless Ottawa.

The reasonable cost of machinery repair (cars, trucks, tractors, trailers) is common knowledge. Which shop for what kind of work? Politics are part of the answer. Do you go here or some other place? Minor stuff, like which hairdresser to use and which hockey team to cheer for or why can the school board not pay a good wage to artists who teach students.

Across the street is the abandoned medical clinic. Abandoned one day in a hurry. Inside the art work on the walls is squared up. The examining tables are as though patients had walked out five minutes prior. The doctors' toilet and shower are clean. The colour-coded patient files are tidy in yellow slots in open cabinets. Something compelling went wrong for the most recent owners and occupants.

Minor controversies, real and imagined, swirl around professions. Even in the building of the modern aluminum-framed clinic some 20 years ago with its low slope roof higher than the houses next door, its efficient insulation and heating systems, its white cladding, its placement on a concrete slab, controversy brewed about where to place it. Whose lots would be purchased.

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At the health centre or at the school, which farm and ranch partners need the available jobs most?  Who should be retiring with their pension intact to allow for someone else?

Once a brave adventuresome community-minded practitioner took up the business of healing the community in a personal storm of British country doctor energy and zeal. She divorced, married the receptionist. She could yell your name from a distant office, demand that you eat less, smoke less, get proper exercise, all the time saying, "Look at me, I am a walking example of poor health. Believe me I know what you need." The smell of chain smoking was in the hair and on chubby finger tips. She could look at a new patient and said he or she had leukemia and he was right sometimes. This doctor would take the time to go to Regina and be your advocate at the hospital if needed - bold, brash and belligerent and loved. After twenty years, she died of a heart attack. The loss was considerable because since then no permanent locally resident doctor provides. A nurse-practitioner at the regional health centre took care for  moles and wounds. That loss was rectified almost immediately when an other lively doctor, escaping from Zimbabwe, the son of a land owner and more British than the real thing prior to him, bought the clinic using an interest-free loan from the desperate government and a relocation grant in aid of rural development and sustainability.

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image © D. Wall