Skipping Seasons

All the people in the world not lucky enough to be from Canada look at us from afar and think cold, snow, and perpetual winter.  Those of us who actually live here know the truth - that we have four distinct seasons, and there are many times when we can experience them all on the same day.

"We're made of tough stuff." I said to myself as I hung sheets and towels out on the line on the weekend.  The grass I was standing on was still summer green and there were two valiant dandelions blooming still by the edge of the garden.  The day before I had almost succumbed to the temptation to get the lawnmower out, just one last time, and that morning I had decided it looked nice enough to hand laundry on the line.  I had been a great plan when the sun was shining but by the time I got outside clouds had rolled in.  It was cold.  And I couldn't be entirely sure that I hadn't felt the odd snowflake land on my face.  Two days before had been shirt sleeve weather.  Two days later it was again.  That, my foreign friends, is the real Canada.

It makes us a 'seize-the-day' kind of people.  If the weather app on our phones points to a limited space of fair conditions the smart among us jump right on that window of opportunity to get stuff done.  There's nothing like the threat of an approaching rain storm to force an unwilling body into a day's worth of weeding garden.  I'm one of those people who always does better with a deadline. 

And the older I get, the smarter I seem to become.  I am especially pleased with myself today; I am a full two months ahead of myself.

The Weather Network began the week sounding the alarm about wind, cold and a possible snow storm for Thursday.  It's late October - nothing out of the ordinary there.  Hallowe'en trick or treaters can enjoy wandering the streets in light jackets one year and need full snowsuit gear the next.  But, it wasn't Hallowe'en that was worrying me; the threatening storm might be only a few days away, but I was thinking Christmas.  I was thinking spring. 

I had been to the city on Monday and was the proud new owner of seventy more tulip and daffodil bulbs, and one more string of outdoor lights for the big Christmas tree I decorate in the yard every year.  If winter was arriving on Thursday I had me a deadline. 

It was absolutely necessary to get the bulbs in the ground, this might be my last chance.  And, I know from experience that it's way less dangerous to be climbing ladders with no slippery ice and snow to contend with. 

It's pretty late in the year to be planting anything - even fall bulbs.  As I planted them I wondered how they would do.  That's the thing about planting anything though, a person does it on faith.  Will they grow?  Will they bloom?  A gardener puts these bits of Mother Nature's magic in the ground and then has to wait a half year for the reward.  We do it all on faith, I guess.  Faith that the flowers will bloom; faith that we will be there to see them when they do.

That done, I put my digging tools away, had a bowl of soup for dinner, and tackled the next job.  For this a series of small miracles had to happen.  I had to remember where I put the other three strings of lights - miracle #1.  Also, the good ladder had to be located - miracle #2. 

And, we have a long extend-a-pole thingy that is instrumental in reaching the top of this tree.  I looked for it where I thought it was - no luck.  I looked for it where I thought someone else might have put it - no luck again.  My expectations were very low when I sent this someone a text asking if he knew where this instrumental tool was - 1) he doesn't usually know these kinds of things, and 2) he is notoriously bad at answering texts when he is at work.  But the gods were with me: he knew and he did - miracles #3 and #4!

So, here it is - October 25th, a full two months before Christmas, and I have my lights up!  In true Canadian fashion I have done a fall cleanup of my flower beds, decorated a Christmas tree, and planted spring flowers all within a few days.  The grass is still green, the water is still liquid, and like I said ... those dandelions are still blooming.

Maybe that's the best way to describe Canadians: we're as tough as dandelions. 

Downwind

I've always joked that 'Saskatchewan' was probably the Cree word for 'hang onto your hat!' 

This reputation we have for being nothing but flat is misleading as heck - our Cypress Hills, the Qu'Appelle Valley, the Big Muddy Badlands, the Great Sandhills, the North Saskatchewan River, the Moose Mountains, and the forests, lakes and rivers of the top half of the province provide a frame for the tabletop smooth Regina Plains, but if a person never ventures out of that city or off the #1 Highway they are never going to see our hidden treasures.

We are a good-natured people though, we laugh along with the flat jokes and the gap jokes.  We wear bunny-hugs and serve jellied salads.  We shake our heads at our neighbouring provinces, always tinkering with their clocks to 'save' daylight.  We sport T-shirts with the slogan "Saskatchewan: easy to draw, hard to spell".  Our devotion to our football team, whether we are actually sports fans or not, is legendary.

We are also a sturdy people.  We have to be, or the wind would blow us over.

I have read somewhere the reasons behind this - something about being in the middle of a huge land mass and the way the Jet Stream directs weather systems - but the bottom line is whether it is a light zephyr, a stiff breeze, or a gale force plow wind, our air is almost always on the move.  A day when there isn't any wind is spooky for a Saskatchewanite; we tend to call this anomaly 'the calm before the storm'.  It's a pretty safe bet that the wind will pick up again, and everything will be back to normal.

As used to the wind as we are, though, every once in a while there is a hum-dinger.  Like Tuesday and Wednesday this week: that was a hum-dinger.

There were all the normal warnings from The Weather Network: put the outdoor furniture away, anchor the trampoline - maybe to a tractor or something, batten down the hatches, and make sure the house insurance is all paid up. 

Monday the wind started to pick up, but it wasn't too bad.  The dog still managed to guilt me into a walk.  The main problem that day was that the seed heads on the cat tails had burst open and the air was full of their fluff - it was in my eyes, ears and hair.  I didn't dare open my mouth against the wind on the way home.  After four days of this the west side of our evergreens look like they are coated in wool and there are shallow 'snow' drifts of fluff across the lawn.

Tuesday afternoon I talked to my sister in Calgary, their day had been very windy.  We weren't supposed to get the worst of it until midnight.

Later that evening we came to understand just how bad it was.  Time and time again the Emergency Alert System broke into the TV show I was watching to announce evacuation of one town after another in Alberta and on into the western side of our province.  Power lines were toppling in the gale, sparking fires that took off at 100 kms per hour - farms, yards, towns, cattle - all in grave danger.  My generation grew up hearing stories about the wild prairie fires of the past, but farming and cultivation have relegated these things to history - or so we had thought.  We went to bed that night, safe where we were, but in awe of the danger presented when fire marries wind.

The aftermath isn't on the scale of the fires taking thousands of homes and dozens of lives in California but any loss is felt on an individual level by the people mourning who or what they have lost - numbers don't matter at a time like this.

We are sturdy.  We are resilient.  We are resourceful.

One thing you do see from #1 Highway, off to the south around Gull Lake, is mile after mile of wind turbines along the hill tops (yes, you heard me right - hill tops).  This is the people of Saskatchewan virtually harvesting power from thin air; harnessing a simple fact of life in this province and transforming it into a valuable asset. 

And to quote another long-standing prairie joke, we need never worry about running out of wind ... because Manitoba sucks and Alberta blows - it always going to be windy in Saskatchewan!

It Takes a Village ...

On the global scale of things, with human population measured in billions and cities claiming head counts of multiple millions, our little prairie community with it's population of approximately 1,000 people just barely tips us into the designation of town status.  Any smaller and we would be a village.  Smaller yet is called a hamlet, and believe it or not the Saskatchewan government has come up with 'Designated Service Area' to describe what is all too common in our landscape - places so low in population that in order to continue managing basic services like water treatment and road maintenance are being absorbed into the Rural Municipality in which they are situated. 

There are most certainly some larger family farms with a higher people count than what appears on a map as a bona fide town.  I doubt that anyone from New York or Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro could even comprehend the space and isolation we enjoy, but that's okay - I have no desire to experience their lifestyle either.

The thing about humans, though, is that the concept of community is not measured in numbers.  It does not matter how many bodies you have to do the work as long as everyone is focussed on the same goal. Whether we live in a huge metropolis or a little town, we all strive to strengthen what we have and build towards an ever more prosperous future.  We see a need like a hospital and recognise that we have a role to play in its success.  A city has to plan for maybe 800 beds, a town only 12, but neither will come to fruition unless these communities step up to the plate.

Large cities have Philharmonic Orchestras - towns have school bands.  Cities build huge stadiums for their big franchise teams - we support our hometown teams in our little arenas.  They have their large theatre companies - we have the local drama club.  The desire to have things like play parks for our kids, safe streets, and healthy Chambers of Commerce is the same throughout human populations, and we all work toward these goals.  I can't help feeling though, that the per capita involvement in little towns is way higher.  We don't have the luxury of many many hands.  Instead we tend to wear many many hats.

Autumn (once the growing season in our farming community is behind us) is our busiest social season.  Between now and Christmas there will be three big fund raising events: one in support of our Health Foundation, one sponsored by the local branch of the Wildlife Federation - a major contributor to local endeavors, and one put on by the local Arts Board.  Each event will offer food, entertainment and prizes donated by local businesses either raffled or auctioned off throughout the evening; all proceeds going back into community projects to improve life for all of us.

Although it's not within my usual comfort zone I find myself helping out the local drama club for the Health Foundation evening.  Last night was dress rehearsal and as our group worked to pull together our black light theatre production the foundation group were wrapping up what had to have been a full day of setting tables, decorating, and placing and labeling prizes. 

The thing that struck me was how many of these people would also be at the core of the other two fundraisers - so many of us are interchangeable that way.  The hockey players are also in drama, the Lion's Club members running the bar also have kids in 4H, the executive of the Foundation donated one of the trailers that make up the stage.  The guy running the sound system is also in the theatre production and will be helping to serve supper.  If you drew a line connecting everyone contributing to the evening the resulting diagram would look like a spider's web.  Or a better description would be a safety net: we are all our own safety net.

It could just be my plain old civic pride but being a part of this makes me appreciate our just-barely-a-town status all the more, and I'm reminded of something I've been observing for years - the smaller the town, the bigger the heart.

Don't Look Ethel!

Not too long ago, listening to my usual Golden Oldies station in the car, I heard Ray Stevens' silly song, The Streak.  For those of you not old enough (or those of you who are old enough but have blotted it out of your memory) this song's verses were a series of Action News reports at various venues where a streaker had just been seen.  Each time the same man is interviewed and he recounts where the streaker came from and what he did, always ending it off with how he tried to protect his wife, Ethel, from the trauma of seeing the spectacle by yelling "Don't look Ethel!"  She always looked anyway.

At the end of the song she is even drawn into the action and joins the streaker in his crazy game.  It was one of Ray Stevens' best - he was great at telling silly stories.

Life seems to be very busy for us these days.  We are at retirement age but all that means is that we work at what we want to, not what we have to.  I no longer go to town to earn a paycheck but my yard and garden are a fulltime summertime job.  My husband is employed in oilfield construction but work is slow so he is working for a neighbour during seeding and harvest.  His year has been busy with re-roofing and siding his workshop and other improvement projects around the place.  My extra time is tied into volunteer work with our local tourism board and helping out with grandchildren.  Let's just say that, as to yet, there hasn't been any time to sit on the front porch in our rocking chairs. 

This past while it has been even busier with canning and freezing and now this week, cleaning up the flower beds and putting planters away.  There is a hospital fund raiser coming up that has taken extra planning.  I am in the midst of finalizing our plans to visit Australia this winter, and that ties into planning Christmas before we go, and that leads to thinking about Christmas gifts.  And it's not even Hallowe'en yet ... and come to think of it, we need to pick those pumpkins before they freeze ....

At least I don't have to worry about hosting the Thanksgiving feast this year - my daughter is throwing the party instead.  They have just moved into a new house and have knocked themselves out to be ready for company in time for Thanksgiving.  I can hear the excitement in her voice every time I talk to her; it's her first time to host the family.  She is thrilled.

And I am thrilled for her.  There's only one small problem: she lives an eight hour drive away.

And that isn't such a bad drive for us old people, but her sister, brother-in-law and their three small children are also going - the little guys may not like the drive so much.

And plans have had to be modified further - Grandpa is staying home to combine because it will finally be dry enough to go by then, and Daddy has to take his own vehicle because he is scheduled at a seminar right after the weekend and will not be traveling the same direction as us.  On the one hand grandpa's staying home solved the "What are we going to do with the dogs?" problem.  On the other hand we had to get their dog to our place so he could keep them both.  Who knew having someone else cook the turkey would involve so much planning?

As of this moment we have exactly 24 hours until we pick the student up from school and head west.  There is still packing to do.  I have been making re-heatable meals for the farmer but the fridge needs some rearranging to get it all in.  I have hotel reservations made - a pool is being offered as incentive to tolerate long periods of car seat imprisonment.  We are bringing as many activities we can think of to keep the short people happy.  They have never travelled this far before; we don`t know what to expect.

Because of all of this happening, a full night`s sleep has been pretty elusive this past while.  Sometimes I can`t get to sleep, but more often than not I fall asleep at bedtime only to awaken at something like 3:34 and spend the rest of the night planning what we still need to do because my brain won`t shut off again. 

It`s not like I haven`t played the insomnia game before; it`s both frustrating and infuriating to lay there in the dark knowing how exhausted you`re going to be in the morning.  I also know that if I can somehow keep my mind blank of lists, if I can derail the train of worries, if I can keep from scrolling down to that imaginary next screen ... my chances of getting back to sleep are so much higher.  Once my mind picks up that fateful thread of thoughts though, I'm done for.

So, for those of you who know Ray Stevens`song, you will understand how in the middle of the night last night I muttered the words "Don`t look Ethel!" under my breath.

But it was too late.  I'd already been incensed.

Digging Up Bones

I was born at potato digging time.  I'm not a spring baby who celebrates with pretty flowers, or a child of hot summer days at the beach.  Neither did my childhood birthday parties involve snow activities.  My parties were held shortly after school began another year, when the grass was still green, but the trees were changing to their fall colours; the days still warm, but the evenings cool.  I vaguely remember being dissatisfied with these circumstances in the early years, but I got over it.

Autumn is my absolute favourite time of the year.  The sky is a softer, September kind of blue, the garden overflows with good things to eat, the sun kinder to my skin.  While Mother Nature dresses summer in a whole spectrum of greens, her pallet for fall is rich with so many more colours.  Russets and rusts, ochers and oranges, as dark as burgundy in one place, as dazzling as gold somewhere else: all waiting for the wind to send them to their final resting place.  One of my favourite autumn scenes is where yellow poplar leaves lay scattered across a green lawn; it always makes me think of pieces of gold strewn on an expensive carpet.

The days are more welcoming to those of us who don't like to bake in the sun.  I take advantage of breezy days to hang laundry on the line, trying to capture enough of that heavenly outdoors scent to get me through the winter.  We can still sleep with the window open a crack - I do it for the fresh air but as an extra benefit we wake to the sound of Canada Geese discussing their flight plan for the day, great wedges of them flying overhead endlessly as the days get shorter.

There is only a little garden work left to do.  The crunch of everything ripening at once is behind me now.  The cucumbers are still going crazy but I've got past my guilt of what to do with them.  There is still pasta sauce to make as the tomatoes ripen and the root vegetables have to be dug, brought in, and stored, but the timing is my choice now - my only deadline is snow, and that's a way off yet.

So I work at it slowly.  This week - the day before my birthday, actually - I decided I would tackle a row of potatoes.  It was a pleasant afternoon - warm sun and my dog withholding judgement on my language when I would spoil  my harvest by spearing them with my digging fork.  As I dug, another day many many years ago came into my memory.  It was probably my 14th birthday and being past school girl parties I had moved on to inviting a friend for a sleepover.  Although we would become very close friends I think this was the first time she had come to my house and I really wanted her to like me ... and then mom had told me to go dig potatoes for supper!  On my birthday!  How could she!

In my 14 year old mind this was beyond awful.  What would my friend think of this?  Why couldn't I be treated with some kind of respect?  It was my birthday, after all!  For me to remember this after so much time, I must have been traumatised.  All I can say now is "Good grief!  Get over yourself Jocelyn!"  But that was then, and I'm much wiser now.

The complete picture of that day was that mom had given me the day off my usual chores - to do the milking.  We had a small dairy farm and instead of more than an hour of milking I had been given fifteen minutes of digging potatoes.  A 14 year old girl full of friend angst can be a miserable thing to deal with, obviously.

But, because I was digging potatoes, the whole experience came back to me and I spent some time thinking about my mother, and motherhood, in general.  I am still learning lessons all these years later.  Like a touchstone the act of digging potatoes brought mom and me together for a moment; it was like a birthday gift from her.  To the Fates who arranged that: thank you.

And to whoever was responsible for playing a certain piece of music on the oldies channel the night of my birthday - the kind of music that a daddy would use to teach his silly, awkward daughter how to dance - thanks again.  It's funny how a little age and wisdom can help you recognize a real gift when it comes along.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in my quest to become a better writer I came across a tip on how best to put your reader in touch with the scene you were describing.  The advice given was to pretend you had forgotten your camera but you still wanted to save the whole image right down to the finest details. 

It's not enough to say that you walked down a dusty road.  Even though everyone has walked down a dusty road and has an experience they can identify with, if that's all you give them in your description it leaves them with a very limited window to look through, not the panorama you want them to be a part of.  You must awaken their senses and invite them to walk down that road with you.  You need to add sound - like the crickets' scratchy/sizzle sound emanating from the dry grass in the ditches.  There needs to be a physical sensation involved like the heat of the afternoon sun on the back of your neck, and that one fly that just won't leave you alone, repeatedly buzzing in close to your face, trying to land on your nose.

You need to introduce the wider scene - like how only the later season flowers are still blooming - the goldenrod and the tiny purple asters at the road's edge.  And wider still ... the school bus in the distance returning the neighbour's kids home or the cattle, also being tormented by flies, taking to a mini stampede across their pasture, thundering to a halt at the gate, stopping to stare at the human walking past.  Then, to draw the reader's attention back to their place in the story, to describe how puffs of dust lift from the road's surface each time a shoe hits the ground. 

The bottom line is that you're still only talking about walking down a dusty road, but now the reader feels that he or she is there with you.

The example given in this writer's help book was an amazing description of - believe it or not - a ham sandwich.  An item as mundane as a ham sandwich and yet so masterfully described that I could taste it as I read, and I absolutely remember it still - the crusty home made loaf, the butter spread lavishly right to edges of the bread, the thick slices of home cured ham, the swipe of Dijon mustard across the meat before the top slice was put in place, the large glass of cold milk it was served with.  My mouth literally watered for just even one bite of this treat - and I don't even like Dijon mustard! 

I've never forgotten the lesson.  Not that I have the talent to do such an amazing job, but it gives me something to aim for.  Even when I don't have any way of writing it down I will give myself an assignment to do justice to some scene I come across.  These days everyone has a camera with them all the time, but a quick click just isn't capable of the texture and depth of what the human eye can see.

I am reminded of a scene one morning on my drive to work that is still frozen in my memory because I took the time soak it in - it was too exquisite to lose and I really didn't have a camera with me at the time.

It was an early summer morning.  The night had been cool enough to condense the moist evening air into mist.  As happens sometimes this mist had sunk into the hollows of the landscape and formed shallow, filmy layers that hung just above the grass.  This phenomenon only lasts until the sun rises high enough to burn it off; the magic is fleeting.

My route had taken me past several low spots where these magical clouds hung suspended by invisible wires, not connected to the sky, not quite touching the ground.  There was one place where I had actually driven through it - the defining line between visibility and invisibility as flat and straight as if someone had uses a ruler to draw it: my windshield was above it, the hood of my car was obscured.  I felt like I was floating.

As other-worldly as that sensation was, the scene that awaited me at the corner was breath-taking.  With the rising sun as a backdrop, at least twenty colours of pink/orange/yellow flowed like liquid through green branches and spread their light across an expanse of white mist.  This, by itself, would have been a jewel of a scene, but dotted throughout the pool of mist rose the heads and shoulders of several cattle - suspended, ungrounded, magical - beasts with no bodies.  I felt blessed that Mother Nature had given me this special gift for being at the right place at the right time.  Because I committed it to memory, I still do.

This has been a very convoluted lead in to what inspired me to write today, but I do have a direction I'm heading with this.  I've been trying all week to find the words that would describe what our world looks like with the smoke from distant ( like a thousand miles distant) wildfires filling our air. 

It isn't the smell of smoke - although we can smell it.  It isn't so much the irritated throats and sore eyes that the weather advisories warn us of - although we can certainly feel these things too.  It isn't the spectacular sunsets we get as the last of the sun's rays burn through a dense layer of smoke and turn the western sky vibrant shades of ochre and burnt sienna - but man!  are they ever something to behold.

The part that is so different, so strange, so eerie is the colour of the light, and believe it or not, the colour of our shadows.  Did you know that a blood-red sun throws a sepia shadow?  I have been followed all week by a tarnished, yellow/brown shadow.  Trees at the horizon have faded back into a  gunmetal blue haze, the sun has been an angry red disc in the sky, and all our shadows have had jaundice.  The word 'surreal' comes to mind, but not in a pleasant way.

Tonight there is finally rain.  This is nice for us but a godsend for those who have been battling the fires, because of course, while the smoke made our world weird, it made theirs deadly.  I will leave it up to them to describe what that feels like.

Prepared For Anything

I spent this morning making many many trips up and down my basement stairs doing a job that rates right up there with scrubbing down bathrooms on my 'things I hate to do' list.  The time had absolutely come to defrost and wash down the deep freeze - the butcher had just called and asked how I wanted the pork we had ordered cut up.  It is only going to be a matter of days and I will need to put it away ... in a deep freeze ... which until mid morning was more of a self-contained iceberg that a food storage facility.  I may as well confess just how diligent I am at this job - I found packages of freezer burnt rhubarb marked 2013 at the very back.  And some other stuff that I couldn't quite figure out - possibly a solid clump of perogies?  Even the dog took one sniff and decided it was inedible.

It wasn't all garbage though, there was lots of food that I stacked carefully back in once the glacier had been removed.  Besides the meat we buy in bulk, the extra loaves of bread, the packages of homemade pasta sauce and apple pie filler, there were 25 pints of corn and other veggies from this year's garden.  The bottom two shelves have been freed up for the pork, although there will have to be some rearranging of the bigger chest freezer to get it all in.

That's right, we have two freezers.  Sadly for me this other one also harbours an iceberg of its own, but that's another day's project.

And no, we're not over-the-top "preppers" who stockpile for Armagedon or other end-of-days scenarios.  We are pretty much normal, rural, common sense people who like to be self sufficient.  There's a lot of us out here in the country.  In the world we live in it's nothing unusual to have a lot of food at the ready.  In my world I can't just call up for take out at 5:30; I live 100 miles from the closest Pizza Hut.  Being self reliant is just a way of life for us.

I've been watching the news coverage for Hurricane Irma and it's made me wonder about how it would be to live in the path of such potential devastation.  Year after year, hurricane season after hurricane season - but then I wonder about the folks in California waiting for their next big earthquake too.  Somehow blizzards never seem so bad.

What does make me stop and think though, is watching the stores being over run with panicked people looking for supplies at the last minute to be able to survive the coming trauma.  Why do they need last minute lumber to board up their windows?  Why wouldn't they have permanent covers ready to go?  Why are they trying to hunt down the last bottle of water at the eleventh hour - Irma has been making news for a week.  All of a sudden they need bread and peanut butter - whose house doesn't have bread and peanut butter?  And there seems to be a real run on flashlights - again - really?  Who doesn't have these things as a matter of regular household items? 

The mile long line ups for gas just blow my mind.  In the winter here we just go by the standard rule to keep the tank full all the time; it only makes sense to treat their bad weather season with the same precaution.

I guess it just boils down to we live in different worlds.  Theirs is the fast-paced, modern, every-convenience-at-your-fingertips world and we occupy a place in space and time where we know we have to take care of ourselves.  I'm not saying we don't shop at supermarkets because we do.  I buy bread, but I can make it.  I make cakes and pies and cookies from scratch because they just taste better, not because there's no alternative.  We have a generator in case we ever have to deal without power for a while.  It wouldn't be at our usual comfort level, but I am certain we could survive on our own for quite some time without a run to town for peanut butter.

It isn't my intention for these observations to sound like a sermon.  I honestly don't know how I would manage if I were in Florida at the moment because I have no experience of Cat 5 storm or a 12 foot storm surge; watching it on TV is plenty close enough for me. 

I wish all the people dealing with Hurricane Irma ... and Jose ... and who knows what comes next ... all the best.  Let them be safe.  Let them not lose everything.  Let them help each other back on their feet.