the first year on....The Little Homestead On The Prairie Part 1

As promised, here is the first installment of the Christmas Letter from 2009 I couldn't bear to chop the photos out of...

Homestead Happenings, 2009 Part 1
Dear Friends and family,
As I sit and begin this letter, I pause and look out my window at the bright sunshine glistening on the apple tree just outside my bedroom window and reflect on this past year in our new lives. It has certainly been a year of great adventures and lots of joy, & a few struggles mixed in for flavour.

(The above photo is one of our first sunsets after we moved
to the farm)

Last Christmas found our extended family newly separated from friends and relations, beginning this grand adventure alone on the Prairie for what would later prove to be the harshest winter in anyone’s memory with more extreme cold weather events - well, we broke a lot of records, they say. I think somebody ought to have designed a T-shirt, but then I was born a BC girl. Out here, it's just another punch you roll with....

We settled in quickly with winter hard upon us, doing what we could to stay warm (our furnace died a week after Christmas!) We thanked God we had been able to get a woodstove installed 3 days earlier!


(Photo left: Cheri admiring our woodstove this November with Kaira in the foreground)

Our other big struggle was to keep water flowing – this was later to prove to be the greatest challenge - that, and draining water out of things again, as our drains all froze up solid!

Eventually, after constantly loosing water in the house and having pipes freeze up, burst, get replaced and then repeat the process a few days later with the next cold snap, it became clear that surviving was Bryan’s first full time job – and with us working all day alongside him! Keeping clean and doing laundry became very hard. When we weren’t working on trying to thaw water pipes, we were trying to dig up potential firewood from under the snow, drag it back to the yard site by human muscle power, buck it up with our chainsaw, all while keeping ourselves shoveled out. Every time the wind blew, our long driveway got buried. It takes 1 person about 6 hrs to clear a deep snowfall, or a deep drifting event from our driveway. Three hours with two working at it. Longer if the wind is filling up the driveway as we empty it!

Exhilarating!
Sound like a bunch of Klingons, don’t we?
“Today is a good day to WORK! “ Kaplagh!
(that means “success!" in Klingon ~ did I mention we are star Trek fans? ) Of course, I can talk...I stayed in and watched the kids and kept the fire going. ;-)


We gave up altogether on the water issues after a long and very, very cold Arctic front blew through near the end of January '09 and froze everything for everyone everywhere (not just us) in the region – even the water cistern in our cellar froze as well as the water pipe coming in from the road that was buried seven feet down for protection! During that storm we lost our second water pump of the winter – dang things don’t like getting frozen and they are very expensive!

(Photo Above: Cheri and Kaira with Doran leading the way going to get firewood from our pre-cut stash)

Obviously, this was a battle that was impossible to win so we gave up and we lived pioneer style for quite some time after that. We were without water at all for about two solid weeks at one point (our longest stretch) during which we melted snow for drinking water and washing dishes, cooking and so forth. Just try that sometime – you get so little water for all the snow you melt, it’s very surprising - astonishing, really - and a lot more work than you would suspect.

When things warmed up enough that water was at least flowing into the house again, it became clear that the whole water pipe system under the trailer where there was NO insulation was totally ruined. Again! After three days of fruitless effort on Bryan's part to even begin fixing the hundreds of leaks, we were getting nowhere. So we said to heck with it and left it that way.

Once the cistern and the incoming water pipe under the road thawed in a "warm period", we lugged water upstairs in big jugs for the rest of the winter – I think they are 5 gallons or 16 liters….very big things. We heated water in my canning kettle and stock pots for washing dishes, baths and so forth. Bath day was a real event; it took all day to heat enough water to wash 6 people. Gone very, very quickly – down the half-frozen drains – went our city-notions about bathing every day. We would have done nothing else but lug and boil water all day every day for baths! There were many other chores to do besides lugging water all day. Now, don't expect me to have photos of this!

Well, OK. But just one!

(Photo Left: Bryan enjoying his turn in the bath while Kaira frolics nearby. Sorry, Bry! tee-hee!)

For the rest of the winter, we lugged water upstairs in big, blue jugs – I think they are 5 gallons or 16 liters….very big things. We heated water in my canning kettle and stock pots for washing dishes, baths and so forth. Bath day was a real pioneer style event; it took all day to heat enough water to wash 6 people. Gone very, very quickly – down the half-frozen drains – went our city-notions about bathing every day! There were many other chores to do besides lugging water all day. But oh, did we relish the delights of bath day! Such utter luxury to lower oneself into lovely hot water! Ah-h-h-h-h!

Cheri had an old-fashioned washboard with which we scrubbed small clothes like socks, undies, dishtowels and so on in the kitchen sink. My shoulders gave out on this activity after awhile as did Cheri’s. Trips to the Laundromat in a neighboring town half an hour away once a week to wash the rest of our laundry cost us a small fortune.

Learned something interesting though; if you want something really, really clean, use a washboard! It does a far superior job and the clothes come out much, much softer as well! Who would have guessed….

(Photo Below:Enlarge this to see how deep the snow was…abt. 3 ft. deep in the yard….deeper in the drifts. The picture does not really do it justice. Low snow year indeed!!! Picture taken from the North looking due South.)

We had more snow than we southern BC transplants are used to by far - and it was a “low-snow” year! We had just our shovels to clear our long driveway, and that proved to be another challenge last winter. We put some of the snow to good use, though, by piling it around the North and West sides of the trailer to help insulate it. Made me wish for snowshoes to get around in it!

We soon acclimatized to the drier cold here - it's so much nicer than the damp cold of the West Kootenay or the BC coast! Here are a couple of shots of us all playing outside in the snow on a day when it was -30C! It was a great day - no wind was blowing at all and it felt like -20C in Kelowna. Lovely weather to play in the snow!

Crazy as it sounds, it is so wonderful to be here – we fell in love with our new surroundings very quickly and began making friends in our new church in a nearby (small, rural) city and out here in the countryside. The warm hearts of the people here more than made for the cold winds that howled like banshee’s outside the thin trailer walls. Well, maybe a couple of exceptions, there...

You know, when I was a kid, I read books about life in the far North, and some of the authors mentioned an odd thing: the wind has a voice, they would say, again and again.

I sat in my warm house in southern BC with the snowflakes gently falling, and thought they were nuts, or using "artistic license". Balderdash.

Guess what?

..........................The wind has a voice.

Look for Part 2 coming soon!