Bananas by Margaret Hanna

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Bananas!

Yes, the fruit.

Several years ago, I was scheduled to present a paper at a conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In early May.

Those of you who are familiar with prairie weather know, only too well, that “spring” in the prairies can bring any and all kinds of weather. Including blizzards. That’s exactly what happened that spring.

Four days before the conference was to begin, a blizzard hit the southern prairies. It raged for three days. All highways, including the Trans-Canada Highway, were shut down. Nothing, not even semi-trailers, moved. Traffic stacked up at both ends of the blizzard zone.

By the second day, grocery stores were running out of fresh produce. A woman roamed through my local Safeway, crying, “Bananas! There are no bananas!”  The manger informed her, “I don’t know when we’ll get more, the trucks are stopped in Manitoba.”

The third day, the blizzard began to blow itself out. The fourth day, the sky was blue and the highways were clear. A friend and I jumped in the car and began the six-hour drive to Winnipeg.

East-bound traffic was bad enough, but the west-bound traffic was constant, and consisted mostly of semi-trailers. Suddenly, the Safeway truck screamed past. We yelled, simultaneously, “Bananas!” and laughed.

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Addie learned what a prairie blizzard was like during her first winter on the homestead. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter Nine: “First Winter” in “Our Bull’s Loose in Town!” Tales from the Homestead.

The first blizzard came in early January. The wind had been blowing from the southeast for a couple of days – a keening wind that didn’t stop day or night. It whistled and whined around our house and went straight through you. Abe brought extra coal into the house and banked snow around walls. He strung a rope from the corner of the house all the way over to the stable. “When the blizzard starts, sometimes the storm is so bad you can’t see more than a couple of feet. People can get lost trying to cross the prairies in a blizzard.” At first, I thought he was joking but he certainly sounded quite serious. I began to get a little worried.

The day the blizzard hit started off nice enough. There was hardly any wind and the sun was shining. “Seems that blizzard you promised has decided to stay away,” I teased.

“Just you wait, it’ll be here sometime today. Now come help me put extra bedding in the stable.”

We walked the few hundred yards to the stable and pitched a wagon load of straw and extra feed in for the livestock and chickens. It took only an hour or so, but the world changed in that time. The wind was stronger, from the northwest, and it sent snow snaking across the ground. And it was cold, much colder.

Then I saw the clouds, grey ugly-looking things coming in fast. They hung low over the world and looked angry. I wondered if this is how the last judgement would begin. The first snowflakes were not those huge soft things that fall like feathers; they were hard, stinging pellets that cut into your skin.

“It’s going to be a bad one,” Abe said as we scurried back to the house.