I was born in Manitoba, Canada however my parents moved to Europe when I was barely two years old and I have no memory of ever living there. I grew up as far east of my birth province as Germany and never any closer than Central Ontario. When I was a child my dad would affectionately refer to me as a prairie flower and for whatever reason it always resonated with me. I have no family in Manitoba, or any real friends or acquaintances there and though I have no desire to live there, to me it is still my home province.

On Saturday, shortly after settling into the park in Alabama, I got a twinge of a headache; just a little hint that there was something in my head waiting to happen but a twinge just the same. I haven’t had any form of a headache since we were in Eugene, Oregon last spring and that one was brought on by my unintentional ingestion of MSG. I have been a regular headache sufferer since I was a child and a migraine victim since shortly after I gave birth to Jamie, my third child. But because it has been so long since I have had a real headache, at one point this year I even dared to think that finally I had “outgrown” them.

Well it has been three days now and the twinge has evolved into a more intense pain that I have been keeping at bay with minimal doses of ibuprophen. It is annoying but not debilitating and I am left wondering why I got it. Perhaps the reason this has happened is because I am back in an area of dramatic high and low air pressure changes, moist heat and humidity or perhaps I really do belong in the west or midwest and I am just a prairie flower out of her element.

Rick took this picture of me last week when I was trying to hard to avoid the moment!