The Solar Thaw

I have been watching the south-facing snow banks along the street, wondering when the snow would begin to melt back wherever dust and dirt catches the sun. Today was the first sign of it this year. I think it takes a certain combination of sun angle, sunny days, and air temperature, so the date varies.  I have a picture of an advanced stage of the thaw from March 15th, three years ago,  here.

Winter Severe Weather

I tap the digits of the long-distance number and wait, half listening, for the point in the menu where I can press 4 for our region and 3 for our forecast. My mind tunes out the random clip advertising other services, but the echo of that voice returns at moments through the day: "Winter Severe Weather..."

In this land, this week,
severe weather is a violent stillness
creeping inward to the places where life
huddles
curling protectively around its own spark
waiting, hoping to last
until rescue.

Lasting until rescue, and knowing some will not, is a grim reality of life in this land. Small wonder that Connie Kaldor sings, "I come from a land that is harsh and unforgiving..." and tells the story of one who "tried to walk and froze to death, fifty feet from town." Sometimes summer too drains life away: again Connie sings of those still standing, stony faced with survivor guilt, "hoping to hold on so you don't end up like the neighbours: him and her, they're weeping as the auctioneer yells."

In a gentler song of springtime, Ian Tyson recalls the names of his neighbours and their ranches, where each in turn is pictured "pulling calves," helping with the birthing and rejoicing that they "made it through another on the northern range." In the last line of the song, though, he brings to mind the name of one more rancher, one who has pulled calves for the last time: "Gid's in the country where the tall grass grows..."

Harvest Home

Picture this (because I don't know where to find a camera with batteries charged up):

• onions and beets spread to dry on newsprint
• cardboard boxes brimming with carrots, potatoes, and squashes
• bags of dry beans, with the sides rolled down to let the beans dry a little more

This week I'll be storing things away a little better: tucking the onions into old nylons and hanging them on nails on the floor joists in the basement; cleaning up some of the carrots and beets and finding some room for them in the fridge, freezing some others, and maybe drying some for soups, too; and clearing some room in a not-too-cool spot for the squashes to sit with some air spaces between them. The dry beans are experiments. I have been growing Windsor broad (or fava) beans for several years, but never understood what they should look like when mature. Finally I read somewhere that they can be picked when the pods start to turn black, and realized that this was not a sign of disease! I let them dry on the vines, and today we gathered them. Also, as a sort of accidental experiment, we gathered the dry wax beans that we didn't get eaten as fresh beans in the summer. We eat a lot of kidney beans and some chickpeas, lentils, and pinto beans, but all of these are tricky to grow in our short summers, so I want to experiment with some other dry legumes. We'll see!

I am very tired, and very happy. I let myself be led away from the garden path for most of the summer and early fall, and when I heard the word "snow" in the forecast I feared I had left it too long, but the rain and snow held off and we got it all in.

Happy thanksgiving!

Square Wave Days

The world sunlight map often shows a sort of sinuous curve along the boundary between light and darkness, but these days it has more of a binary look to it.

Hearts Far from the Earth

A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is finished, no matter how brave its warriors or how strong their weapons.
Cheyenne Tsistsistas

Like many others on the Internet, I am repeating the above words without knowing much about their history. I first saw them on a poster about the "Sisters in Spirit" campaign to draw attention and response to the disappearance of hundreds of native women in Canada. The words have haunted me.

They came back to me this week, as I pondered a sad change in the hearts of women here. It goes along with a change in language, I think, where the terms "spring" and "thaw" and "runoff" are now heard less frequently than the term "breakup." What matters to people these days is not when the air is warm, or when the hills get bare, or when it's time to start garden plants, or when the pasture will green up, or how soon the fields might be tilled; instead, it's when the roads "break up" as the frost comes out, so that the heavy equipment in the oilfield grinds to a halt.

Twice in the last couple of weeks, I have heard young women rejoicing that breakup will be short this year. Both times I said I would rather see a couple of feet of new snow before then. In the past, almost anyone would have agreed that we need the moisture, but these women did not. One said she had to support her boyfriend during breakup, and the other said her boyfriend would be around the house too much.

The proverb talks about conquest, but conquest is not the only way for a nation to be finished. It can also be finished when the hearts of its women are too far from the earth.

That Time of Year

These are the days when the temperature creeps up close to the melting point, and the strengthening sun pushes sand and dust particles up over that crucial point, thawing a honeycomb of brown-lined caves into the south sides of the snow ridges along the street. I noticed it beginning a week or so ago, when the air temperature was still staying well below zero, but the solar melt had begun.

Last week, too, I noticed my neighbour blowing the bank of snow away from the wall of his house. He piles it up there all winter, keeping the house warmer, and then when the thaw approaches, he clears it away and keeps the house dry. I wonder how he knows when to do it.

These are the days when the sun warms the pavement, and any snow that sifts across it in a breeze is apt to stick. On Monday I got out on the highway and found it a skating rink, so I crept along for two miles and then escaped to the safety of a gravel back road to finish the trip to Carlyle. On Thursday I went directly to the back road.

These are the days, some years, when I am starting to wonder where I will pile the snow if I have to shovel any more. This year, I am just wishing it would snow. I'd take a picture of the snow pile, to compare to other years, but there isn't one. Aside from clearing a bit away from the doorway, I haven't shovelled snow all winter. My neighbour's snow bank against his house was so small, I think he cleared it in one pass with the blower. Our snow is just packed on the driveway, because it never got deep enough to bother. Last winter I think we had more snow on the ground in November than we've had throughout this winter. And last winter there was almost no runoff.

These are the days when I notice horned larks again. I don't know if they've just returned, or if they've been here for a few weeks but I've finally returned to the back roads to see them. What wonderful symbols of hope they are, adapting to fallow field and gravel road side, returning to this snowy barren landscape before there is any sign of spring except the quick flash of their own tiny wings and black-edged tails.

Seen on our street

That Chill in the Air . . .

. . . and that smell of heated dust as the furnace starts up for the first time this season. I put it off as long as I could, and we're leaving the thermostat low, even though it makes for somewhat clumsy typing fingers. The original house is still closed in, but it's not quite as weather resistant as it used to be. And once we get the new part closed in, there will be a spell when I don't want it heating much, until we get the vapour barrier in to prevent condensation in the walls. Eek. 'Tis the season of desperately hard work before freeze-up.

Speaking of weather, I found a new source of online weather forecasts. I have used Environment Canada for years now, but in these days of eyes on the sky, I grew envious when I heard talk of a 14-day forecast. The Weather Network clearly uses the same observation stations, but they seem much more willing to go out on a limb with more detailed and extended forecasts. So far, I think the Environment Canada temperature predictions are closer to the mark, and the 14-day predictions are only a rough guide, but still useful.

If you're marveling at the temperature differences showing up between Moose Mountain Park in the hills and Carlyle on the flats nearby, look closer. The actual observations come from Broadview and Estevan respectively.

That brings up another issue. I have a CD of weather data for western Canada, and browsing through that, my impression is that the number of stations collecting weather information has declined steeply in recent decades. Does that seem odd to you? Here we are, all concerned about rapid climate change and perturbed regional weather patterns and more erratic weather events, and at the same time, we are relying on an increasingly sparse net of stations to tell us what is actually happening on the ground.

And in these days of increasing emphasis on "citizen science," I couldn't find anything on the Environment Canada website about opportunities for citizens to make weather observations, except the Skywatchers program for schools. I know Garth's uncle submits weather observations. I'll ask him.

But I won't be volunteering this fall!

Tilting Time

The sun is setting. Through gaps in frosted tree tops, I can see bands of pink colour lingering on the blue-gray clouds.

According to SunriseSunset.com, we are within a day or two of our earliest sunset of the year, more than ten minutes before the hour of 5 p.m. Their calendar lists sunrise and sunset times to the nearest minute, so I can't tell exactly which day marks the turning point.

By the time the winter solstice rolls around, our sunset will be moving later again. In those last few days before the solstice, the shortening of daylight will be only on the morning side, with sunrise still moving later, right through until early January.

Why?

From a New Scientist article, Early Days, I have a shaky idea of how our days shift through this dark time of the year. The U.S. Naval Observatory offers what sounds like a more systematic explanation in The Dark Days of Winter, but my understanding still feels a bit unsteady.

The impression that stays with me is this. Solar days pulse slightly over the course of a year, making the time from one noon to the next longer and shorter. Time as measured by the sun does not march exactly to the beat of atomic vibrations. We don't correct our clocks for this pulsation. Although those 24 hours on the dial suggest that we are keeping track of solar days, we are really approximating them, and clock time wobbles around solar time without quite matching it.

Twice in the last month I've seen an "atomic clock" offered for sale. It's really just an electric clock that automatically resets itself when it detects a radio signal from an atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado. You can get one at Lee Valley; you can also get a sundial. With the atomic clock, you can make detailed observations of sunrise and sunset times and then try to get your head around their movements. With the sundial, you can observe the solar day directly, and not worry about how many wobbles of an atom fit into it.