Brutally Cold

The storm lived up to its billing.  First we got almost a foot of snow and then the wind picked up and the temperature dropped like a stone.  It's really winter now.

Our farm yard is like so many others here on the prairies: it's surrounded by a tree shelterbelt.  When the land was first settled in the late 1800s and early 1900s there were no trees here at all.  Mother Nature had kept them from establishing themselves out on the open prairie with a pretty regular occurrence of prairie fires.  My grandparents used to talk of having to go to what is now Moose Mountain Provincial Park to cut the winter's supply of wood in the summer time and then head back up there with teams of horses to haul it home once the snow made the haul easier.  That is almost an hour's drive now in today's vehicles; think of the work it was for them!

It didn't take the pioneers long to get planting trees and plowing fire guards, and recognizing the insulation factor of having trees to stop a blizzard wind, they planted rows of trees around their homesteads, especially to the north and west.  Ours is such a shelterbelt, we are protected to the north and west and open to the south and east which helps us get out of the yard after a storm.  If the wind blows from one way and plugs the west lane we can get out to the south, and vice versa.  Of course, getting out of the yard is only step one; then there are three miles of gravel road to the highway, and four miles of highway to get to town.  We know what "stormed in" means.

Tuesday night last week the wind picked up, as advertised, but we could barely hear it, meaning it was coming straight out of the north.  When we woke on Wednesday morning we couldn't see past where the trees end in front of the house but the snow in the yard still lay as soft and fluffy as it fell.  The wind hadn't touched it.  When the wind changed direction later on and blew more from the west, long, rock-hard drifts blew in through the maples but the driveway is still clear to drive.  It all depends on the direction and speed of the wind but sometimes the snow sculptures that Mother Nature comes up with are breathtakingly beautiful.

What came next was the bitter cold.  Out came the cords to plug in vehicles and the car got packed with extra winter wear and heavy boots; being caught out in windchills of 40 below is a life and death situation.  It has "warmed up' (and I use the term loosely) to minus 25 now; our dog who is part Husky can't figure out why there have been no long walks this past week.  He can keep on wondering until the temperature creeps up a bit more!