Flatlander Faith

I hope everybody had a chuckle over the mistake in my last post. Two millimetres a year would come to two hundred millimetres in a century, or twenty centimetres, not two metres. If you look at the post now, you will see that I have corrected the error.

Warm weather was late in arriving this year, but when it came the appearance, and sound, of our yard changed almost overnight. The trees between us and the farm yard next to us have become a dense forest, obscuring any hint that there might be another house and other buildings a short distance from us.  All the birds are back, singing happily in the cool of the morning and evening.

Tuesday morning I heard a loud humming from the caragana trees south of our house. Walking closer to see the source of the sound, I found bees busily collecting nectar from the yellow blossoms which cover the trees. They buzzed around me, but didn’t bother me.

As I walked down the road a marbled godwit circled overhead, loudly announcing my presence. There were ducks on the ponds on either side of the road, frogs conversing loudly, blackbirds singing on the fenceposts and from somewhere I heard a willet and what I think was a grasshopper sparrow.

There are swallows and wrens nesting in the nestboxes in our yard. Godlfinches come to our birdfeeder and sometimes we see a brown thrasher underneath the feeder. Meadowlarks and robins make themselves heard, we think we got a glimpse of a catbird one day. The lilacs are starting to bloom, the strawberry plants are full of blossoms. In short, the beautiful days of summer are here.

There is another aspect of Saskatchewan weather that makes itself felt in summer as well as in the other seasons − the wind. A book published twenty years ago, If you’re not from the prairie . . .*, contains these lines:

If you’re not from the prairie,
You don’t know the wind,
You can’t know the wind.

Our cold winds of winter cut right to the core,
Hot summer wind devils can blow down the door.
As children we know when we play any game,
The wind will be there, yet we play just the same.

We had such a wind yesterday, and not being children anymore we didn’t feel much like going out to play.

*If you’re not from the prairie . . . © 1993 by David Bouchard for th poetry and © 1993 by Henry Ripplinger for the illustrations. Published by Raincoast Books.