As I write, I am looking at a picture of my youngest daughter. Sitting outside with her cat, she is in a short-sleeved knit shirt and track pants; her feet are bare. The photo was taken on December 31, 1997. There is no snow in the picture.
The long fall of 1997, stretching as it did past the shortest day of the year and so into winter, has been a blessing for many whose fall work was cut all too short in 1996 when the snow came, and stayed, in early October.
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We had been snowed in twice by Christmas that year, and I confess to enjoying the respite this year with sunny weather and passable roads right up until the first day of the new year.
Sitting in the doctor’s office one day, a gentleman with a few years on me declared that the winter of 1930-31 was just like this.
Being as that was the start of the Great Depression and the dust bowl, that didn’t do a lot to put confidence into many hearts but, as Wheat Board Minister Ralph Goodale said, we’ve never lost a crop in December yet.
While we may not have lost a crop in December, a lot of merchants in our town and I know in others, were doing a lot of nail biting through December.
Between the postal strike and the lack of snow, Christmas business was slow getting started and it seemed to me that there were a lot more pre-Christmas sales being advertised than usual.
One thing that sold well in our town this Christmas was a book called The Projectionist, written by one Michael Helm, born and raised in our town. Indeed, our town and its landscape play a major part in the book.
I once heard Regina mystery writer Gail Bowen speak about being a prairie, and particularly a Saskatchewan, writer. She said that the weather and the landscape almost become characters in their own right in her work.
This is true of many Prairie writers; it is true of Bowen today and it is true of Helm.
As the saying goes, you can take the boy from the farm but you can’t take the farm from the boy. I suspect that you can’t take the prairie either. And part of the prairie in winter is snow.
That’s one reason why there was been so much consternation this year over the lack of it.
A prairie winter without snow blowing and the wind howling just isn’t, well, just isn’t right or decent. Just ask anyone who’s ever lived here.
