Talk about seasonal activities in your hometown

I am from a rural area in the prairies of west-central Canada. The range of temperatures throughout the year can be as low as 40 below in the winter and as high as 30 above in the summer. Because of that, we can see a huge difference in our seasons and have the chance to do many kinds of activities.

In the coldest temperatures there isn’t that much we can do outdoors, because even with heavy layers of warm clothing we can get frostbite in minutes. However, when it warms up to about –20, we can bundle up and go outside. My family has always had a couple of snow mobiles around and with those we would spend a lot of our winter days driving through the snow or pulling a variety of toys like inner tubes, sleds, and even people on skis. Sometimes we would take day trips and drive the snowmobiles longer distances through the snow. Because we live in the prairies, there aren’t any mountains or many rivers so the wide-open fields and hills are perfect to go in any direction we feel like.

In the spring when the ground begins to thaw, our country dirt roads turn from slush into slick or sticky mud. For everyday life it is really a hassle to drive and slide on the roads. It was always a skill to get out of my car without getting my school or work clothes dirty from touching the outside of the car. However, on weekends we would go down some old back trails with our pickup trucks, put them into 4-wheel drive, and take a drive. Sometime this activity led to someone getting completely stuck, but a neighbor was always nearby to pull us out. Come to think of it, pulling people out of ditches was an all-season activity in my hometown as people would slide off the road in a blizzard in the winter or get stuck in the mud after a rainy day in the summer. It was so common that my family always had tow chains in the back of our vehicles just in case someone needed a hand.

While pruning trees or cleaning up the farmyard our family would collect a large pile of wood that we would save for summer nights. My dad made a bonfire pit that we would load up with branches, and a few times in the summer we would call friends over for a hotdog roast. My mom was really good at making what we called “bush pies”. They are just 2 pieces of bread that are buttered on one side and filled with a variety of things like cheese, pizza ingredients, or blueberry pie filling. We had a cast-iron mold that held the bread sealed tight that we set in the hot coals of the fire to toast and cook. My mom could never make them fast enough for my family to eat. My brother and his family actually started their own tradition of having bonfires in the winter as well when it wasn’t too cold yet.
Even though we lived away from city life we were never bored and always found something fun to do. I would say, though, that most of the fun we had was riding in some kind of vehicle and depending on the season we could enjoy many different kinds of vehicles: quads, dirt bikes, fishing boats, go-carts, dune-buggies, gators, and snow planes, just to name a few.

Laura

Vocabulary
prairie (noun) – a flat, wide area of land in North America and Canada, without many trees and originally covered with grass
frostbite (noun) – a medical condition in which parts of the body, especially the fingers and toes, become damaged as a result of extremely cold temperatures
bundle up (phrasal verb) – to put warm clothes or thick material on somebody
thaw (verb) – to become soft or turn back into a liquid after being frozen
blizzard (noun) – a snowstorm with very strong wind
a hand (idiom) – help in doing something