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.

 

                                                          STRAIGHT LINES

Something I learned very early on in my farmwife life is how much straight lines matter.  Not lines of writing on a page, not when drawing a diagram, not even when sewing a patch on a pair of work jeans - in all these instances arrow straight lines are just being 'fussy'. 

"Just get on with the job!" 

"Just scribble your note down!" 

"Grab a pencil and do a quick sketch to show me!  Nobody's going to see me on the tractor - I just need my pants so I can get to work!"

But, and it's a very big but ... when a wife is entrusted with a tractor and harrows she had better put her perfectionist hat on.  Even newly married and still very much in love with me, if I made curvy or wiggly lines in his fields, it just made him twitch.

I thought his insistence on straight lines was just a tiny bit over the top.  There I was, learning how to operate a huge four wheel drive tractor, worrying about how far out those harrows swung when I was turning (don't take out the fence posts!), and making split-second decisions on whether that low spot was dry enough to farm or someplace to sink a tractor in mud, and he was all crazy about leaving straight lines behind me.  Sheesh.

Oh, I'm not saying that straight lines don't look nicer if you can pull them off, but it's trickier than it looks.  One would think, what with Saskatchewan being flat, and being that our entire province is surveyed on a perfectly square grid system, that straight lines would be in our DNA.  Sadly, this is not the case. 

Saskatchewan doesn't exactly live up to it's tabletop flat billing.  There are places that are pretty level, and there are places of high hills and deep valleys - and the other 95% is rolling farm land.  There are bluffs of trees in the way, rocky creek beds to avoid, and countless sloughs in the low spots; all places to go around.  You can start out, your first line right against the municipal road allowance, arrow straight, and by the time you've crossed the field twice you're already off kilter.  Well, at least, I am.

He tried valiantly to coach me.  "There's a science to it", he would say, "it's not hard."  He had been doing it since his early teens; I was trying to pick it up at almost twice that age.  I think I missed my sweet spot of 'field talent development'.

"You just set your sights on a land mark directly in front of you.  Way in the distance.  Just aim for that one tree, or road sign, or rock pile, and your line will be straight." His confidence that this was going to work always amazed me. 

"And when you get to a slough, just do a headland around it and then come around and pick up your line on the other side and make for your land mark again."  Simple.  Just like that.  And don't do it twice just to 'pretty up' a sloppy first time; that wastes time and fuel.  But again: it's simple.  Just like that.

Every once in a blue moon, just like when the total at the grocery till comes out to an even $72.00, karma would allow me maybe 5 swipes of a field arrow straight, but I never let this go to my head.  I know a fluke when I see one.  I never did master the art (and it is an art) of consistent straight lines but I did get so I planned a field so that I would be out of sight of the road before my lines got too wonky. 

Two things though: he judged other farmers by how straight their lines were (I wasn't alone), and I was never given the job of seeding - way too permanent to see those rows growing crooked for a full season.

The way he feels about my garden rows not being straight is something I choose to ignore.  They're MY rows.  I garden to de-stress, and the vegetables taste the same.

I just came in from mowing the yard.  It's a huge expanse of grass and I have a wonderful zero turn lawn mower to do the job with.  Just for the fun of it I try to change the pattern I mow from one time to the next.  Today's operation was a diagonal, which meant I had to pick a landmark on the other side of the yard for my first line.  I failed miserably, and spent the rest of my time trying to get the 'wow' out of my 'straight' line.  Took me back to the good old days.

He wasn't home to see it, thank goodness.  He's working for a neighbour - seeding... in a tractor with GPS.  His lines have never been straighter, and this time there is "a science to it".

                                                 PURE POTENTIAL

“Give a woman an inch and she’ll take a mile.”

It’s an old adage and there’s probably some truth to it although I’m pretty sure you could substitute words like ‘kid’, ‘man’, ‘teenager’, or ‘dog’ for ‘woman’ and it would be just as true.  With the #metoo movement going full on these days it’s important to keep things non sexist.

On the other hand, if you were to say “Give a gardener a square foot and of dirt a single petunia and there will never be an end to their expansion plans.”  My husband is fully aware of this.  So was my dad, and his father-in-law before him, not to mention the two sons-in-law we have acquired.   The women in our family have this gardening bug bad.  Or maybe, I should say we have it good – wherever we go we manage to carve out a space and create our very own happy place.

More than it being a simple matter of just plunking seeds or bedding plants in the ground, what sets true gardeners apart from folks who fill flower beds that already exist is that we would never think of stopping at the status quo.  It would just make us twitch.

In fact, we could not be happier than when we’re offered a whole new space to play with: a wide open untouched space, an absolute blank slate.  To a non-gardener it might look like a plot of land – a reason to buy a bigger lawnmower.  To a gardener it is a canvas to fill with colour and texture and scent.  And we can’t wait to get started.

Non-gardeners tend to see obstacles, whereas gardeners picture a whole array of options when presented with the same bit of real estate.  Things like rocks and trees and slopes present unfulfilled features to be added to, augmented, and enhanced.  “They” see work.  “We” see pure potential.

My personal chunk of prairie has been a work in progress for the past 35 years.  Over time the original shelterbelt/windbreak has been bolstered with new rows of trees, the vegetable garden has occupied four different locations looking for ‘the perfect spot’, and while we’ve added on to the house twice, we’ve also added two man-made hills to give the house a prettier setting.   We’ve built an impressive rock garden into a slope and then moved all those huge rocks and installed them a new hillside a decade later because of the snow removal difficulties the first location caused.  Although seeing the first one destroyed nearly broke my heart, the new one is, as promised, bigger and better with even more rocks.  My on-going project is to clear the deadfall and broken branches out of the tree line – the part I’ve got done looks so nice, proof that I have to keep going.  Lately we have opened up a new area and planted everything from apples and cherries, asparagus and strawberries, saskatoons, currents and grapes.  If we live long enough we will enjoy an orchard too. 

It’s a lot of work.  I love every square inch of it.

This week I was given a great compliment and a new challenge.  A young neighbour has asked me to help her create a garden in her yard.  She, like I did, finds herself in a large farmyard with only a few remnants of a previous woman’s touch.  She, like I did, sees pure potential.  We are both excited to get started.

                                                      A LITTLE MORE ORPHANED

I don’t know if it’s a tradition bigger than our little home town, but it’s customary here to post funeral notices at the post office.   I have no idea how this came to be a thing but it works well: everyone comes for their mail so the word gets out quickly and yet the post office lobby is usually a room you have to yourself when you’re there.   There have been a few times when I was glad to be alone when confronted with news of a sudden death, or the end of a long struggle with some terrible disease.  It allows for a private moment to adjust to the news.  Sometimes that’s important.

One such card caught me a little off guard not too long ago.  I saw the name and was thankful for a private moment or two to read the whole card and acknowledge the sadness I felt.  It wasn’t that I was surprised by the news – it just so happened that a few weeks earlier this gentleman and I had a conversation while he waited for his wife to do the grocery shopping.  I could clearly see his health was not good.  It seemed that he had aged twenty years since I had last seen him, although at most only a couple months time had passed since then.  He looked frail.  He had lost so much weight.

Our visit hadn’t been a long one, mostly because just the effort of speaking left him winded and I didn’t want to tire him.  The conversation had trended to life philosophies and although I don’t know if he used these exact words what I remember him saying is “I think I’ve run my race.”  I felt sadness then too: I’m not the kind of person who will argue against the truth, and we both knew he spoke the truth.

Still, the funeral card in the quiet of the Post Office lobby was a sad sight for me.  Another one is gone.  Again I felt just that little bit more orphaned.

Let me explain.

My own parents are both gone; I have been legally orphaned (if such a thing is possible at my age) for quite some time.  But as time goes by in this little home town the generation who are regularly passing away now are the parents of the people I went to school with.  The generation I was taught to respect as my elders when I was growing up, and who never lost that implied authority as I joined the work force myself.  Although my relationship grew to be more personal with many of them over time (especially with this fellow, he was always trying to sell the story that he was a grumpy old man when it was so evident he was just the opposite) they never lost that aura that they were older and wiser than me.

I wonder: does their passing bother me most because in the big picture their absence alters the fabric of our community’s life?  Or is the problem much more focussed - am I being forced to understand that as these wise ones go, others will have to step up and fill their shoes.  That would be my generation.  That would be me.  

Does being in the company of parents allow us to feel that we can continue to be followers, not leaders?  Can we still draw comfort that we are the protected ones, not be expected to do the protecting ourselves?  Is that why I feel a little more like an orphan with each and every funeral?  Is that why each of their deaths affects me on a personal level? 

It also has me wondering if it’s a comfort or a curse to spend a whole lifetime living in the same place, surrounded by the same people.  If my life had taken me away from this town would I have connected with people the same way?  Would I have built the kind of relationships with the people I’d met along the way to experience this same sense of loss when they died?  Would losing them leave me feeling slightly orphaned?  Or does it take an entire lifetime to create something so replete?

 I can tell you this, though: as uncomfortable as it is to feel orphaned, I’m kind of glad I’m a home town girl.

 

 

                                      SNIFFING THE WIND

The other day as I was preparing supper I happened to look out the window just as the scent of frying pork chops hit the breeze.  Our dog had been lazing in the afternoon sun, sprawled out on the trampoline – it’s where he guards his kingdom from.  As I watched he went from a dormant, oblivious, pile of fur to upright and alert, sniffing the wind.  I’ve never seen a dog more in tuned with the world through his sense of smell.

But then, aren’t we all?

This wonderful season of spring has us all out, sniffing the wind.

Finally the never-ending Saskatchewan wind has more substance to it than just ice and snow.  Its relentless movement across the land stirs up not only what we can see – good old Saskatchewan dust – but also the things we can only smell: the earthy goodness of warming soil, the pungent tang of opening poplar leaves, and the whatever-it-is that makes clothes hung outside to dry smell so wonderful.  Even the less savory smells of thawing cattle sheds or freshly churned slough mud are welcomed as proof of life in a world so long dead and frozen and white.

Just like our dog, Turbo, we’ve gone from dormant to alert, and ready for action.  Everyone is venturing outside to look for odd jobs to do – anything to stretch the muscles and soak up some sunshine.  There are yards getting raked and tree branches being trimmed; a general tidying up while we wait for the grass to turn green and the dandelions to start blooming.

Gardeners are all trying to satisfy their longing for green things by planting seeds inside.  At the rate my giant pumpkins are growing I’ll soon need to trail their vines around the living room.  I might have been a tad over-eager for an early start when I planted them, but it was something to do until I could go out and play in my real garden.  Everyone has the same itch – even those who keep their gardening down to a few deck planters - just want to get started, to feel the moist earth on their fingers, to see the sprouts break through the soil.

And, on a much grander scale, a drive around the countryside shows the industrial side of growing things.  Tractors and all kinds of implements are parked helter-skelter around farm yards where it’s dry enough to change cultivator shovels and grease wheel bearings; the kinds of things that give farmers something to do while they wait for the frost to come out of the ground.

The other day I had to smile at the sight of one farmer’s seeding machinery, all hooked up and parked at the edge of a field.  Obviously all of his pre-seeding tasks had been taken care of but the time still wasn’t quite right to get rolling yet – but boy, was he ever ready to go! 

To me, as I drove past, it even looked like the tractor had its nose in the air, sniffing the wind.