Winter on the Prairies

 

As I drove out of my heated garage in my heated vehicle on Monday and headed for town, the thought came to me, "What was it like to live in southern Alberta in the winter long ago?"

The one constant is that the prairie winters have always been dark and cold. Our strategies to cope with that have changed over time. 

Even as a kid growing up in the sixties and seventies, I have memories of life in winter being different than it is today. I remember quilts and coats being heavier, but not as warm. I remember mittens knitted from wool getting soaked right through after snow  ball fights and making snowmen. It seemed that the winters were more severe and lasted longer then. The snow was deeper and my dad made a trail from the house to the barn. I remember walking through it with snow piled high on either side. I remember taking out our little wooden sled and being able to get some pretty good runs in the drifts just in our own farmyard. I always liked it when the snow was crusty and you could walk on top of it and didn't sink down. 

School mornings began in the dark with a bowl of oatmeal or cracked wheat porridge and getting dressed was a rushed affair as furnaces and insulation were not as effective back then. I was just grateful that girls were allowed to wear pants by the time I attended school, unlike my older sister, who had to face wearing a dress everyday in the cold. Those were also the days before leotards and pantihose and keeping your legs warm required wearing long stockings, held up by garters. Uggh!

My mother grew up during the Great Depression and I remember her telling about riding into town in a buggy with quilts covering their laps and heated rocks to keep their feet warm. There was no central heating and she remembers waking up in her attic room and finding frost on her bedding. Homework was done around the kitchen table by the meager light shed from a kerosene lamp. Evenings were cut short as times were hard and the kerosene needed to last as long as possible. Bedtimes were early and the nights were very long and very dark. 

What would it have been like to be a First Nations person in the early times and spend winter in a tipi out on the prairie? What strategies did they have to keep their children warm through blizzards and temperatures below zero, much below zero?

I realized that all of my Windy Rafters Roughnecks books take place in the summer, when the Ferris cousins gather to run the resort for the tourist season. Perhaps it would be interesting to set one book in the winter and explore those dynamics, especially historically.

As I drove along I had another more sobering thought. What about those, even today, who don't have adequate food and shelter during the winter? What about those living on the streets whose circumstances of unemployment, mental illness or addiction have left them vulnerable. Is this year, given the pandemic, going to leave even more people than usual in desperate circumstances? Something to think about looking out on a cold winter morning from inside my warm house.