Have you noticed how apocalyptic weather reports have become? “Unprecedented Siberian cold blankets the prairies!” “High risk of frostbite and hypothermia.”

Those of us who are native to the prairies love to complain about our weather extremes. I used to tell people that when I was a boy we had days every winter when the temperature went down to 50° below zero Fahrenheit and every summer we had days of 105° above zero Fahrenheit.

Sifting through my memories a little more realistically, I believe that 50° below zero happened twice during the years I attended school. I had a half mile walk to school, I was bundled up in layers of winter clothing and still had to keep clapping my hands together to keep my fingers warm. And the coal-fired boiler at school had a hard time getting steam up to the registers in the second floor classrooms.

As for the 105°, that happened at least once. We were having a family picnic beside Plaxton’s Lake in Moose Jaw, I was wearing swimming trunks and it took a few days to recover from the sunburn.

Yesterday we cousins had a get-together on Zoom to exchange New Year’s wishes. A cousin in Portugal said that they hardly went out to a café because it was raining all the time. She grew up in Saskatchewan, the high here was -27° Celsius yesterday, what was she complaining about?

I have concluded that we here in Saskatchewan love to complain about the weather because it proves how tough we are. We can handle it.

It helps, of course, to have a warm house, a car with heated seats, a heated steering wheel, all wheel drive and enough clearance not to get hung up on snow drifts. And a grandson who comes over with a big machine to clear our driveway.