Dreaming of Sweetpeas

The winter must be starting to wear long on me; last night I dreamed of a whole hedge of sweet peas I had planted. Of course, looking back the whole thing was surreal - I had planted the seeds in a window box and they had spread downward, not up toward the sunlight. Actually, the craziest thing of all was that they had grown in the first place - I never have any luck with sweet peas. Regardless of how unrealistic the details of the dream were, though, the message is clear enough for me - my mind is starting to toy with the promise of spring, the colour of green, the scent of fresh-tilled earth. I know we're only about to start February, but the daylight hours are beginning their stretch, we're on the right track.

Another sign that winter has been long enough is that I can't wait to hang the laundry out on the line to dry. The best part of a Saturday is bringing in those sheets and towels, and with them, the smell of FRESH. They can try all they want, no chemical perfume is ever going to be able to recreate fresh air and sunshine.

We still have two more months before our calf crop starts to arrive. At the moment the cows are all out on the pasture, and sheltering in a bale enclosure that Glen built for them. Other winters they've spent the whole winter in the barns, but Glen had planted grazing corn for them last spring so in order to utilize it they had to go to the feed, not have Glen bring it to them. We had to wait until the ground was good and frozen so they wouldn't trample it all into the ground and waste half the crop, and we needed a good supply of snow for them to eat because there is no water in that field. We didn't know how that was going to work out - this herd had always had access to water in the winter and we weren't sure how they would adapt to using snow instead. There was a week or so that they were pretty sure they needed to come home for water, but then they just settled right down. To tell the truth, we were aprehensive about it too. I know in the wild animals live off snow all winter, and our neighbour has been wintering his cattle like this for years, but when you've never tried it yourself, you just aren't sure.

Sometime this month Glen is going to start making chop for the herd again. The feeders have been getting whole oats and peas all winter, but closer to calving we'll be bringing the herd back to the corrals and stepping up their diet too. I'm kind of looking forward to this in a way - last year I set my mind to losing some weight. Although I cut back what I was eating right after New Year's Day, until I started helping fill and carry chop pails, nothing seemed to be happening. By the end of summer I had almost reached my goal, but there just wasn't enough physical activity to keep burning significant calories once the feeders were sold and I parked the lawn mower. Exercising for the sake of exercising just doesn't seem to be a good use of my time, but give me actual work that needs to be done, and I feel like I'm accomplishing something of worth. It may sound silly, but I can't wait to get back to doing chores.

The weather has been playing with us this week. We've had really cold temperatures - and we've had two or three days at well above freezing. The last two days have had the wind just howling out of the northwest, picking up snow and blowing it across the highways where it stuck because the pavement was so warm. I was glad that I didn't have to go any further than to town and back.

Baby, It's Cold Out There!

It has been one nasty week here on the prairies - a time to tuck into a nice, warm house, and just stay there.

We arrived home from sunny Mexico late Saturday afternoon with our daughters picking us up at the airport. We spent the evening with them and my sister and her family (our fellow travellers), eating pizza and sharing our holiday stories. After a while Jesse wanted to know why we hadn't taken our kids with us, and to tell the truth, I had started to wonder the same thing halfway through the week. I guess I had always felt that this was a "grown up" holiday so you left your kids at home. I regret that decision now; it's a great way to introduce kids to travel, different cultures, and how to behave as an ambassador of their own country while they are there.

After temperatures in the mid twenties for a whole week I was surprised that the cold at the Winnipeg airport wasn't more of a shock to the system. I guess we can thank our lucky stars that we didn't land on Thursday of this week - with windchills of more that minus 40 degrees, we might have frozen solid in one breath.

In our corner of the province, we escaped the blizzard that totally shut down the city of Saskatoon mid-week; we only received a few centimetres of snow and the really cold winds, but the news casts from places north and west of here certainly kept us in tune with what was going on. I can remember some pretty significant winter storms in my life - a blizzard in January of 1978 that lasted the better part of a week and left snow drifts so high that we couldn't let the kids play outside afterwards because they would have been able to walk right up to overhead power lines and touch them - but the weather office insists that this storm doesn't have a rival in history until you go all the way back to 1955. It must have been something else, alright, to have zero visibility inside a city is pretty bad.

As a child of the fifities and sixties I grew up hearing stories about how the pioneers coped with blizzards by tying a rope between the house and the barn so that they could find their way home after tending to their animals - and woe to anyone who left that saftey line because it was so easy to get disoriented in the cold and swirling snow. People died then, and Mother Nature is no kinder today - three people died this week in Saskatchewan. It is a very sobering lesson to have to re-learn.

We're left wondering what the rest of the winter holds in store for us. It is still very cold, but they are promising better temperatures by next week. Mid and northern Saskatchewan have had lots of snow, and we've had more that we ever got last winter, but we'll happily take at least double what there is out there at the moment. Farmers are looking forward to the coming crop year - the "what to plant to make big bucks this year" and "the newest equipment that you can't possibly farm without" advertising campaigns have begun. Spring can't be far off now.