Findings | Here and there
Author Archives: Laura Lindblom
Findings | Here and there
Roseberries
The roses that bloomed profusely this summer faded long ago, and in their place is a bounty of red rose hips. A friend, Hannah, and I found them a week ago while we were hiking on a logging trail on forest service land. I immediately started making plans to harvest some, which Anna and I did yesterday afternoon.
Rose hips, if you didn’t know this already, are the fruit of the rose plant. The hips are edible, but not raw–they have large seeds and a hairy pulp that need to be removed before the fruit can be consumed. But they can be made into jelly, or dried for use in teas. I’ve never harvested them before, since wild roses weren’t profuse enough in Illinois for any sort of meaningful gathering. Like with any small fruit, it takes a lot of plant to produce enough to logically and practically harvest from it!
But here, wild roses grow with abandon, as do raspberries, sunflowers, and any other number of wildflowers which lavish their abundant color and life onto an otherwise often hash landscape. There is a beautiful paradox in the presence of a fragile flower beneath the shadow of a towering granite peak. The delicacy of a flower or the perfection of its fruit highlight the grandeur and power of towering peaks and granite spires, just as their magnificence highlights the delicate beauty and diminutive intricacy of the wildflowers. Can they really belong to the same world? Yes, and the same God created them all! What goodness.
Anna and I spent two hours out on that forest service trail. A lot of it we spent walking, but the weather was perfect and the 5:00 sun soon hid itself behind trees and hills. We found one particularly good patch of rose hips, and gleaned from there for quite some time before moving on. Next summer, I’ll have to remember that rose hips come into season earlier. There were a few places where the rose hips were much overripe, considerably past pickable ripeness. Notes for next year. But we ended up with enough hips to make some jelly (I’m thinking rose-rhubarb sounds good…) and dry some for tea. Not as much as we’d like, but enough for the first year.
Birch and aspen trees have been catching my eye lately, and more yesterday, it would seem. There is something haunting and sylph-like about their white trunks and branching limbs, more noticeable against a backdrop of ponderosa pine and grey granite than perhaps they would be otherwise. Perhaps it is C.S. Lewis’ references to birch trees and dryads in his wonderful Narnia series that have haunted my imagination and still do. They’ve always seemed different to me, otherworldly, enchanted. Along the forest service road, they clustered in hollows and lined meadowland, stark and beautiful and dreamlike.
Little things can be so profound–The gentle cup of a harebell, or the golden glow of a head of grass. Profound and captivating, if you let yourself look hard enough and without any other expectation than to see something beautiful. How common a harebell is! How common a head of grass is! Yet how uncommon, how wonderful, how full of meaning. And how temporal, how fragile, how short-lived, soon to be struck away by the first hard frosts and the winter snow.
What a joy it is to have the sense of sight, the sense of smell, of touch, taste, of perception, the ability to recognize color, the permission to experience the joys of this world. Sometimes we go so quickly through life that we miss much, we miss the meaning in a harebell, or in ripe and golden grass. We miss the meaning in a towering peak, or in the racing openness of a prairie, open to the skyline. We look right past everything, missing those gifts that God has given us, the gifts we never had to work for, the gifts that demand nothing of us except the expectation of joy.
Some gifts we do have to work for, and those give even greater pleasure. One of those would be the joy of family, whether it be spiritual family or earthly. Yesterday, I got to experience some of the joy that comes from earthly family, the joy of cultivating healthy and loving relationships before God. I’ve got some pretty wonderful sisters. And hopefully they’ll help me with the rose-rhubarb jelly.
September sky
What better way to end a Sunday than by marveling at the glories of God’s creation? I could have sat there for hours, just staring at the sky, watching the occasional meteor come flaming into sight, basking in the silver light of a thousand million stars.
He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names. ~Psalm 147:4
Is not God high in the heavens? See the highest stars, how lofty they are! ~Job 22:12
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said:
2 “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
3 Dress for action like a man;
I will question you, and you make it known to me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
7 when the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy? ~Job 38:1-7
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork. ~Psalm 19:1
God is good.
Garnet sand
Out here in the Hills, down in dry creek beds and ravines that have had water flowing through them, there is a lovely phenomenon we call garnet sand. Millions of little tiny red stones will pool up together, dunes of scarlet and purple and burgundy, pooling up when the water is running, then glinting darkly in the sun when the water has run off and the earth has dried.
We started picking garnets in dry creek beds probably a good ten years ago, and each of us girls has found our share of decent garnets. But the fun of the hunt is always there when we find a new deposit of garnet sand.
Most of the garnets really are very little bigger than grains of sand, but sometimes, if you’re careful and if you’re lucky, you’ll find garnets that are good sized, a few millimeters in diameter. The best ones have probably been half the size of a pea. Old timers tell stories of garnets the size of the end of your little finger, but those are from higher up in the Hills, closer to the source of the stones.
It takes a fair amount of water to wash up new layers of sand, and down along the Hole-in-the-Wall jeep trail, on the part of the trail that runs in an old creek bed, there was obviously more than a fair amount of water. Turf had been peeled back from the rocky bottom like bark on a sycamore tree, curled over on itself with all the roots of the grass showing and the smooth stone underneath polished clean of dirt.
The trail has even changed significantly since we last hiked it two months ago or so. Then, it was mostly grass, and pools of water here and there. Now, it is rock and sand, no water. Right below a little five-foot spillway, the entire jeep trail was rock and sand and, yes, a new layer of garnet sand. Most of the sand is like you’d see anywhere but flecked with mica, deposited in a deep drift probably six inches deep in places, new since this spring. But on the top of the drift were sweeps of deep burgundy, brown in the evening light, swirled together with the golden sand.
These little red stones aren’t worth much, but they sure are fun to hunt.
August | In Hindsight
Never a dull moment! August came and went, in some ways seeming to be a very long month, in others flying by too quickly.
The Sturgis Rally at the beginning of the month put everyone on edge. It wore me out, at least. Although no final numbers have been given, the estimate was that 1.3 million people would be congregating in the western third of a state with a population of less than 900 thousand…That’s a lot of people, in case you had any doubts. Glad that is over.
We spent time with friends and family, over meals, on hikes, enjoying the outdoors and wildlife, doing some shooting and taking pictures. God has blessed us with a wonderful church home and with a strengthening community of believers with which to fellowship. What a blessing.
I spent a week with Jack and his crew working cattle in South Dakota, Wyoming, and Nebraska, which was a welcome relief from the craziness of the tourist season. “Maybe she’ll marry a rancher,” Grandma says with a laugh.
After much deliberating, I gave my two weeks’ notice at the antique shop I worked at, and worked my last day last week. It was a great summer job, but the hours weren’t sustainable. After a few months working there, I realized I needed more time at home, more time with my family, more time spent in God’s wonderful creation, more time doing the things I love. It was a good decision, I must say. If you feel like you’re about to go crazy, do yourself a favor: look for other options. Give yourself permission to think outside of the box.
Eriogonum pauciflorum – Ballhead eriogonum
I wouldn’t want all months to be as busy as August was, but it was a good month. When Sarah and I hiked this evening, we were talking about being in South Dakota. Sometimes I still have to pinch myself when I think that we’re actually living here. Sarah commented, “God really cares about these things.” He cares that for as long as we’ve been alive, we’ve wanted to be in South Dakota, our “ancestral home,” as I like to think of it. He cares that this was one of the deep longings of our hearts, the desire to be here with family, the desire to walk these hills and these trails, to smell the pines, and listen to the wind singing through the needles on the trees. We’re here. And this is home. It always has been. Even before we were here. God knows. And God cares.
Song Dog Journal 