August | 2015 | Song Dog Journal

Penstemon glaber – Sawsepal penstemon

So we have come to the end of our fifth month in our new home. In some ways, things are still getting settled into place, and in others, we’ve found a routine. God continues to amaze me with His goodness and His love and His providence. He has provided a church home, friends and community, work for all of us (shout-out to my Dad–He went on a radon testing trip to Chadron yesterday! Getting things going!), blossoming family relationships, good health and safety, and the blessing of living where we’ve always wanted to be. God is good. So good.

Over the past month or so, we did the membership class at church and are soon to be welcomed officially into this church. The meetings were encouraging, insightful, and spiritually awakening. The past few years were hard on my spiritual well-being. Not hard on my faith–If anything, the last few years have drastically strengthened my faith in God and His love for His children. But I found myself spiritually exhausted. A lot of things contributed to it, I know, but my prayer has been that God would re-awaken my heart for Him. And He has–And I couldn’t be more glad.

Mariposa lily

I’ve done some more thinking about the next few months and next year, and what I can be doing now to be making myself more home-based. I’ve realized, particularly over the past month, that I am as much a homebody as ever, and that I really (really, really, really) don’t like town, even a small town like Hill City. A full week of working in town is exhausting, even when I am not doing strenuous work, while a day of sweat and dirt and gasoline and chaff leaves me feeling mentally alive. Even when I’m wheezing from the dust and my arms are itching from my allergy to spruce trees. Time to make myself more home-based, or at least rurally-based. We’ll see how that progresses.

July was a busy month! We spent time with friends, went hiking, worked like crazy, saw rattlesnakes, hunted wildflowers, celebrated my Grandma’s 92nd birthday, house-sat for my uncle and his family, we had hail storms and thunder storms and our first stretch of 90 degree weather, I’ve learned about push rods and drive belts and greasing up a lawnmower, we visited with Dad’s college roommate and his wife from eastern South Dakota, Sarah and I drove Spearfish Canyon and saw the waterfalls, and we completed a membership class at our new church. It was a good month.

What will August hold, I wonder?

We live under the shadow of a snake-infested ridge.

Okay, so that’s a bit of a stretch, but rattlers have been seen from time to time on the ridge above our house. Yesterday, I went out to my truck, parked to the right of the old chicken coop, just in time to see two entwined rattlesnakes come tumbling down the face of the ridge and disappear behind the chicken coop.

After a rush of some heavy adrenaline while we made sure the pets were all out of the way, we went back to observe. We watched one of the snakes slither slowly back to the top of the ridge and that was that. Or so we thought. Fifteen minutes later, we heard rattling and ran back over to watch the show. Two snakes, probably the same two, were entwined and rattling furiously above the cliff, on a steep grassy slope. Their curious dance brought them further and further down the slope until they tumbled in a writhing mass off the face of the ridge. Once again, we watched as they slithered back to the top. That was the last we saw of them, and Sarah and I left for an evening hike with Jessie and Roy, two friends from church who live in the neighboring town.

But when we got back that night, and after we had been standing in the yard talking for twenty minutes, Jessie suddenly said, “That’s a snake over there. He’s a big one!”

Sure enough, there was a rattler, coiled up not twelve feet off at the end of our sidewalk. And there had been people coming and going for the last half hour!

We weren’t entirely sure what to do with it, but he sure couldn’t stay there. We watched him for twenty minutes or so, amused by how he reacted to shadows passing over his body when we waved our hands in front of the yard light, listening to the fascinating sound of his rattle, and amazed at how long he could hold his body up, unmoving and perfectly silent. Beautiful and dangerous. We kept our distance.

Finally, it was time to get rid of him. Roy picked him up with a pitchfork like a piece of spaghetti on a dinner fork, and took the angry, rattling creature over to the ridge.

Fortunately, seeing rattlesnakes in this quantity or with this frequency is rare. But it was all still a little unnerving.

We let him go this time. But Mom’s determined to get rid of it for good if we see it again.