After picking plums this morning, I took a quick jaunt onto the Wildlife Loop, and to my delight found the buffalo herd. Unfortunately, tourist season is still underway and a number of tourists had found the herd as well, but the buffalo were scattered and it was possible to get some good shots.
Such beautiful animals.
And really, it only took probably a half hour to pick these. The bigger the fruit, the funner (yes, funner) to pick. Because it goes so much more quickly. I love picking chokecherries, I really do, partly because it is somewhat therapeutic, partly because I love chokecherry jelly. But when it takes about 2 hours to fill a gallon-sized bucket…Well, plums are much better in that regard. However, if you ever get a chance to pick wild plums, be sure to wear tough jeans and a thick jacket or sweatshirt. They have some serious thorns. 
Not bad for a morning’s work.
At the beginning of this growing season, our two little apple trees were very promising, covered with blossoms. Since we don’t prune our trees, this was the “on year,” the year we were supposed to get a good crop of apples. Then, a month or two months later, the fruit looked promising as well. The apples started pinking up, and they even began to taste like fall. We had just started commenting on what we would do with this crop of apples…and we got our hail storm, which pummeled those two little trees pretty badly. Needless to say, we were disappointed! But I went out a couple of days later and scavenged under the trees, picking through the fallen apples. My initial idea was to try to pick up the ones that were “just bruised.” When I saw how pathetically few apples there were that were “just bruised,” my standards loosened, and it became something like “the ones without bugs in them.” Even that standard slipped, and as long as the bugs weren’t embedded, the apple went into the bucket. Some of them were damaged and rotting beyond use, but I picked up a large bucketful of apples, and spent a couple of hours cutting off the bad spots.
We cooked the apples this afternoon, and put them through this antique ricer we had in the Miner’s Cabin – a beautiful piece of kitchen equipment! The smell of apples cooking is the smell of fall and plenty, the smell of harvest and celebration and family gatherings. It reminds me of Curtis Orchard, a family orchard we used to visit in Illinois, and the wonderful apple donuts they were known for. 
The tart apples had cooked down into a beautiful golden sauce, steaming hot and fragrant. We now have it in a slow cooker to turn it into the wonderful thing called apple butter, since no one in the family particularly likes applesauce. A recipe to come…
A couple of things come to mind as I think back and write this. One obvious thing is just how fortunate we’ve been this year, as I think of the flooding down south and the fires north and west of us. The drought has been hard on this region, and we’ve had our hail storms, but compared with the destruction of the floods and the fires, we have been amazingly fortunate here and have nothing to complain about.
The second thing that comes to mind is just how good God is. As I was picking up fallen apples, looking at the spoiled spots, the bruises, the damage, resisting the urge to call it a lost cause, and thinking ahead to my plans for those apples, it seemed like a mini parable. On our own, we have nothing to offer – not to God or to anyone else. We are damaged and bruised and broken, completely corrupt at heart. Yet Jesus takes us and washes us, rather than giving up on us, and even in our brokenness He uses us to His glory. This side of Heaven, our bruises and brokenness will never completely go away. By God’s grace, those things will heal and lessen to a certain extent, but we will always struggle in this life. But He takes us anyway and calls us His own. How glorious.
Glorious, like apple butter. But better. Far better.
When we got to church in Custer yesterday morning, the smoke was thick enough we could smell it. By the time we all headed down to the basement to have lunch together, it looked like fog had settled over the town. There had been a fire down south of Custer near Argyle, which had reached 100% containment in the space of a few days, but maybe lingering smoke from that? On the drive home, the more distant hills were obscured, and everything was subdued under a murky grey haze. We asked the clerk at Krull’s grocery in Hill City where the fire was, since rumor had it a fire had started up by Hill City, causing the smoke.
Nope, no nearby fire. All the smoke is from burning Montana.
An article on a Colorado news website lays out the situation – Montana is under a state of emergency and has been since July. Fires continue to crop up amid this “firestorm,” and there may be no relief until snow sets in.
All the national attention has been focused on the situation down south, particularly in Houston, but we need to not forget our neighbors in Montana and other states in the north and northwest. Hurricanes aren’t the only natural disasters rocking parts of our country right now. Wildfires are an ongoing threat and imminent danger up here, and Montanans in particular are suffering. We’ve been fortunate to have a low-key fire season here in the Hills, in spite of fire weather warnings. But winter is a ways away.
Pray for rain.
We headed out around 6:00 this morning, just Mom and I, hoping to catch a sunrise over Custer State Park. The smoke had lifted some from yesterday, but a thick haze still obscured the colors of the sunrise. The buffalo were nowhere to be found. Those were the main things that I wanted to photograph, but a drive through the Wildlife Loop (or anywhere in the Hills for that matter…) never disappoints.
An early drive through the Park means very little competing traffic, and we buzzed down side roads and backtracked here and there, all in all driving the Loop about two and a half times over the course of the morning! Little splashes of color in the fading grasses and shrubs caught our eyes, including these vibrant hawthorn berries.
We enjoyed a small herd of pronghorns, and this curious little darling, who frisked about with his elders. A few burros ambled along near the road, a couple pair of mamas and babies, a few yearlings, and a few adults. The burros have such wistful eyes, and funny expressions on their fuzzy faces.
I don’t know that I could name the highlight, but I was pretty hungry on the way home. A beautiful thicket of wild plums was sure a treat.
Like I said, a drive through the Hills never disappoints…
A recent storm tore into our neck of the woods, leaving us with drifts of hail, shredded trees, and some damage here and there – and a few clear reminders.
No. 1 – Gardening and the Black Hills are not companions. If anything, they are indifferent to antagonistic acquaintances. If a late frost doesn’t kill the garden, the drought will. If the drought doesn’t, the grasshoppers will. If the grasshoppers don’t finish it off, the hail will. If the hail doesn’t, an early frost will. This time, it was the hail.
No. 2 – A storm that “doesn’t look like much” can still pack a punch. As it rolled in, Mom and I almost took bets on whether or not those clouds contained hail. I would have lost by a long shot. The storm rolled in, spitting little rice-like pellets of ice. A cloud of fog blew in, and the storm intensified, gradually dropping bigger and bigger hailstones, which bounced and leapt in the grass like popcorn. They got larger, sounding like bricks dropping onto the deck, shattering every direction. When the hail finally stopped, it looked as if it had snowed.
No. 3 – Those things that we see as “bad” are often accompanied by a blessing. Sure, we got a smashed garden, but we also got almost an inch and a half of rain, between the storm with the hail and a storm the previous day. We are moisture starved here, and that inch and a half will do wonders. We went to check the rain gauge, and the top had shattered off. A well-placed hailstone.
No. 4 – No matter how bad things get, there is always someone else who got hit harder. Mom had worked hard on her garden this year, and it was just starting to produce! Some regret is only natural. But one of the nurses at the clinic where I work has a daughter who lives in Houston, and we’ve been getting updates from her on the state of the storm. Meanwhile, we have a lot of haze in the air from wildfires further west. Montana is burning, Texas is underwater, and all we have to complain about is a smashed garden. What storm were we talking about again…? Nothing like perspective.
Song Dog Journal 