SELF DEFENSE

       One would think that this time of the year would bring out the happy in everyone.  The peonies and roses are in bloom, the roadsides look like someone has gone and purposely decorated them with wild flowers, and if you know where to look for them, the prairie lilies are beginning to bloom.

       The grass is so green and lush.

       The air is fresh and moist.

       After a very dry spring Mother Nature came through with significant rain and the sloughs are full.  The ground drank in what it could hold and the rest flowed into our yard where it’s busy processing a billion mosquitoes per hour.   Yes, folks, that’s where they’re all coming from; our front yard.  Sorry.  But it’s not like they have all left to torment you – several million opted to stay on the home place. 

      It’s a beautiful time of the year.  Everything is so clean.  Hummingbirds flit around the deck chattering at each other and sipping sugar water, spring calves chase each other around in the pasture, and Killdeers play their ‘broken wing’ ruse on anyone who ventures too close to their nests.  This kind of pastoral scene brings out the best in all of us.  If we left our TV sets off and never watched the news, just think how happy and content we would all be.

      We would be even happier yet, if we could only go outside and enjoy it all.  I know I would.  I really don’t mind weeding gardens, and mowing grass is one of my favourite chores to do.  Being outside is what I dream about all winter.  It’s funny how a person can blot out ugly memories of mosquitoes when it’s forty below in January.  I guess the opposite is also true –as I slather myself in nasty insect repellent memories of forty below mellow out and are almost pleasant in comparison.

       The species plaguing us at the moment, probably called something like vicious torturious, is a particularity nasty one.  With some species you can hear them coming, but if they get in close enough to bite you don’t feel the puncture.  With these guys the opposite is true; they seem to have no sound but their bite is vicious.  Is that Mother Nature’s idea of balance, I wonder?  She has such a wonderful sense of humour, Mother Nature does.

       It’s the sheer numbers that are crazy this year.  Walking across the lawn is unpleasant, step into the shade and a visible cloud of them lift off the ground and come for you, try weeding the garden and you will be amazed at the number of bloodsuckers that can hide out in a single tomato plant.  I wouldn’t recommend trying to mow between the rows of evergreen trees unless you have 911 pre-dialled on your phone and your blood type pinned to your shirt in case you need a transfusion when they find you.

       Desperate times call for desperate measures.  Facebook keeps insisting that a mixture of stale beer (I ask you, who lets beer go stale?), Epsom salts, and cheap blue mouthwash will make your yard mosquito free for a whole summer.  I have trust issues with what Facebook pushes, but this information was verified by a real live person whose opinion I do trust, so I gave it a whirl.  Some key areas are better, but I can’t afford the beer to treat my whole yard.

       Plan B is electrocution.  I have purchased the Flowtron Outdoor Insect Killer and as I write this a Tower of Doom is being constructed to hang it on.  Actually, it would already be busy killing bugs by now except that the creator of the Tower of Doom decided to get all decretive and fancy with the drill stem he was using.  The first attempt at erecting his creation also didn’t go as planned ... but that’s a story for another time.

       Luckily I have other things to do today.  Appointments and meetings, a lunch date and an oil change for my car; I will be gone all day.  The weeds will continue to grow and the grass will need cut again but I don’t have any guilt about leaving them today, and that super duper bug killer will be on duty by tonight. 

       It’s funny how I have so much more faith in Plan B than I did in stale beer.  Driving to a special store and paying lots of money must establish authenticity, I guess.

       Sure do hope it does work, though.  Plan C is embracing the forty below solution.

      

 

                                                                 WAIT FOR IT .....

It’s counter intuitive.  I know this.

Sane people would simply hang out in the basement, just in case.  Or maybe they would decide to take a drive to the north, maybe about 100 miles.  Oh heck, make that 200, just to be on the safe side.  Sane people keep careful watch on their weather apps, hoping all the while that predicted storms would dissipate and the warnings would be withdrawn.

People lacking a fair bit of their sanity keep watch on their phones too, but it’s not in hopes of calmer skies.  It’s for the tiny little adrenaline rush we get out of knowing that we’re ‘in the zone’.

We are a crazy bunch, we prairie people.

‘Tis the season, here on the prairies.  June and July can brew up the most impressive storms, and these days the technology of predicting the weather is getting much more refined.  We can enjoy a full week of anticipation out of ‘favourable conditions’ as the pre-storm days tick by.  The sane people pray for calm; the rest of us get a bit of a buzz as we watch the potential storm models expand.  And an elite few actually make a living out chasing after storms all over the continent.  Hats off to the Tornado Hunters – they capture some amazing photos of Mother Nature at her most fearsome.  They are out and out crazy. 

Most prairie folks occupy the middle ground of staying put and dealing only with the storms that come to them.

Over the past two weeks we have been under two watches.  The first one was a lot of wind and an inch and a half of rain but really nothing to write home about.  As soon as the sun came out though, and we were dealing with feelings of let down, we were told “just wait till Thursday!”  The excitement percolated back up.

Building a really good storm is a lot like making the perfect cake: you need the correct ingredients and they have to be stirred in at the exact right time: our local kitchen was fully stocked with everything that was needed.  Tornado hunters from far and wide turned their trucks for southeast Saskatchewan.  They even named a few towns most likely to be involved and ours was one of them.  It makes a person sit up and take notice when they get that personal.  Those storm hunting guys know their stuff.

Thursday was a different day, alright.  I don’t know that I would use the word ‘ominous’ if I hadn’t known the forecast, but the suspense was palpable.  There was heat and humidity; dead calm interspersed with windy intervals and then back to breathless calm.  The cloud formations were not necessarily threatening, but definitely weird.  I decided the best thing I could do was walk around the yard and take ‘before’ pictures; provided a tornado didn’t wipe out my camera too, we would have a reminder of what we had lost.

Mid afternoon found us sitting on our deck pondering why you always feel you have enough insurance until a time like this.  Everything we could park under a roof was parked under a roof.  We had discussed, at length, which was the correct corner of the basement to head to and I had ‘called’ the mattresses on the beds down there for the extra cushioning safety.  There was nothing left to do but wait.

It missed us by about 30 miles.  The air went cold but the hail that caused this was wrecking trees, cars, and houses to the south.  The power was off for 10 hours because the storm flooded our main source of electricity in Estevan.  We put on jackets and barbequed smokies and ate out on the deck, texting and checking Facebook for news of how friends and family had fared.  The storm had lived up to its billing, but everyone was safe.

We Saskatchewan people love our “Land of the Living Skies” reputation.  We all live with our eyes to the horizon and revel in the feelings of both being puny in the face of Nature, and strength and self reliance in ourselves at the same time.  This prairie philosophy inspires a spirit in us as big as our skies.  Maybe that’s why, even though we know it’s a little crazy, we’re already wondering when the next storm will brew up.  We’re already waiting for it.

 

                       ZERO TO SIXTY

Tuesday, a mere five days ago, one of my top priorities was to water the baby trees I had just planted.  Also, the watermelons I had cruelly put out into the baked earth of my garden needed daily drinks.  They were my second shot at those summer fruit vines.  The first batch had withered immediately upon having to deal with the desert-like conditions of the ‘real world’ circa spring 2018.  I don’t know if it was stubbornness or optimism that had me try again, or maybe I just like hauling precious water around my yard.

Drought is not something I have had to deal with much in the past decade so I am not set up for it.  It’s not like I can just turn the sprinkler on, I would need a half mile of hose.  And even if I had a half mile of hose, I would need an iron-clad contract with our well that if I watered my garden as much as I wanted to, that it would still be able to supply my household water needs.  Like for right now, and on into the future until it rained significantly, or there was snowmelt next spring. 

“There is nothing more precious than water.”  I would explain to each and every plant as I blessed them with their alotted ration every two days.  I wanted them to feel special; that they were the chosen ones who rated a drink.  Heaven knows we all needed a morale boost.

But, that was so last Tuesday.

In this land of extremes we have gone from powder dry and desert-like to a shallow lake in the front yard in less than a week.  Actually, it was four inches of rain in 24 hours that did the trick.  One hundred miles to the southwest they got double that much and are dealing with all kinds of flooded basements and washed out roads.  Been there; done that.  I will keep my grumbling to myself.

So keep this in mind ... this is not grumbling.  These are merely observations; comparisons of life from one week to the next.

Last week the deck planters had to be replenished for the second time because the unnatural heat of May 2018 had cooked many of the newly transplanted flowers.  Pansies had wilted back into the dirt, the bacopa looked crispy fried, even some indestructible petunias had given up the ghost.  This week I tucked them all in under the eaves of our partially covered deck to keep them from being drowned out and whipped to shreds by the storm.

Last week I mowed the yard.  I hesitate to call what was there either ‘grass’ or ‘lawn’.  The only thing growing in the backyard were dandelions – dark green dots of ugliness sprinkled across the crusty yellow of last year’s grass.  The front was a tiny bit healthier looking but was still 94% dandelions, the balance being swamp grass growing down by the culvert.  I usually enjoy my time on the lawnmower but last Tuesday I was coated in road dust, and a pine cone that had fallen unnoticed onto my machine’s muffler almost set the whole thing on fire.  On a positive note, I could mow the whole yard.  The plant life under all that water this morning is a neat 3 ½ inches high.

Last week I could walk across my garden to check on what wasn’t growing.  I had to wear shoes because the soil was so hot and crunchy.  In three rows of corn maybe 15 seeds had managed to germinate.  There was the odd potato poking through.  Onions are tough – they were all up.  And the sunflower seeds we had left for the squirrels last fall had sprouted everywhere but I didn’t dare do too much weeding because I couldn’t tell where the rows of wanted vegetables were planted.  This morning I found a carpet of green throughout the whole garden.  I still can’t distinguish rows but the red root pigweed and lamb’s quarters have taken over the world.  Now I don’t dare walk in the garden because I would sink past my ankles in the mud.

Last week I had no spare water and was concerned about our well.  Yesterday was spent getting the sump pump up and working in the basement.  It’s been running steady ever since.

A beaver wandered into the yard last night, probably thinking he had found a prime stretch of real estate.  Last week he was likely thinking beaver habitat was a thing of the past.

This morning I took a wander around the yard and was glad to see that all the baby trees had their heads above water.  I can’t see the watermelon from the edge of the swamp ... I hope they’re okay.  For sure, they don’t need a drink.