When my stepchildren were young, I remember cautioning them to think twice about using that “hate” word….that it was an awfully strong word. Well I can’t hold back on that word these days. I have to say I do hate cancer and now what it is doing to my beautiful young cousin Karin. She’s not even forty and she finds herself battling a very aggressive cancer that is in fact diagnosed as terminal.

I dedicate every day to her. Nothing that happens in my daily routine can be as scary or as painful or as stressful as what she has to awaken to every day. I can pray for her, for her family, for her doctors but I wanted to do something a bit tangible too. So my husband and I entered a cancer fundraiser on the weekend in honour of her. It’s called a Cutter Rally and many horse-drawn cutters and haywagons gathered to ride either a 3 or 7 mile route through the fields on a sunny yet windchilling day. The cowboys, like my husband, rode horseback but most of us were either passengers or teamsters of a horse-drawn sleigh of some sort. We raised a tidy sum of money towards cancer research and funding efforts and had great fellowship with like-minded, good-hearted folks.

Here’s the one and only cadillac-heated version of a horse-drawn cutter….the rest of us were open to the elements.

And here is the view I had from my seat on a hay wagon…