The new year has already been flying by! We’re 17 days into February and I haven’t even taken the time to write a review of the month of January. Time flies too quickly. The month of January was a quiet month. That really is nice sometimes. The quiet and the mundane are appreciated after the hurry and bustle of the Christmas holidays.
The Christmas bustle was just sifting away, like a breath of snow, when Jess and her fiance Nick came to visit. For a week, I enjoyed some time off spent with them and the rest of the family. We enjoyed the typical tourist activities, like Mt. Rushmore and the Wildlife Loop in Custer State Park, as well as some less-frequented gems, like Spokane. We were also able to take a day to drive down to our property in Pringle. Since it is an hour and a half south of us and it isn’t even remotely “on our way” anywhere, we don’t get down there very often. When we do, it is a joy! Such beautiful country it is down there. So remote and wild and untouched.
When I was able, I spent time working in the Miner’s Cabin to get it closer to being livable – Dad and Sarah got a lot done, working on the wiring, getting the wood stove usable, and sorting through years of keepsakes and books and artifacts. With the wood stove going, the Miner’s Cabin is now a wonderful haven even in the coldest weather. The stove is rather too big for the cabin, but it sure heats it up quickly! I spent hours out there in January enjoying the quiet, sewing some new skirts, listening to “Adventures in Odyssey” and Zane Grey, and enjoying feeling the warmth slowly take over the little house. I am really looking forward to being able to move out there.
January was sprinkled throughout with ideal weather – Anything from 50 degrees and sunny to 15 degrees and snowing. A beautiful snow storm or two afforded some lovely hiking – One hike in particular through the heavily falling snow was like walking through a fairyland. Time after time, I wished I had my camera, but I’m sure I would have dropped it multiple times as we all slipped and slid through ravines and creek beds.
So January rolled by quietly and unobtrusively, punctuated at last with the romp of rodeo at the Black Hills Stock Show. Great times. It is always encouraging to see such a crowd come together for some good, clean fun, for a sport that is so steeped in hard work, sweat, and Western dust and dirt.
The months keep breezing by – Each with their own flavor and their own set of memories. The first month of the year is past. And there are 11 more months to go in 2016!
The first little bit of springtime waked to the world on our windowsill – A beautiful paperwhite, a species of narcissus. My aunt gave the bulbs as Christmas gifts to the families, and ours bloomed, less than a month after Christmas. Springtime is just around the corner!
We’ve been working hard getting the Miner’s Cabin closer to inhabitable, and week by week, we make progress. The electical was looked at by my dad, Jess’s fiance, and some knowledgeable men from our church, so we’ve been okayed on that. Dad maintenanced the wood stove and we have raided the woodshed up at Grandma’s house multiple times. That old Miner’s Cabin is already becoming a cozy place to spend an afternoon or evening. Nothing warms like a wood fire, that’s for sure.
The fire was hardly needed yesterday morning, and before I got the cabin warmed up, it was warmer outside than in. Kashka, the black kitten, found her favorite sunny spot on the porch on top of a pile of old rugs. She basked as only a cat can. What a life a cat leads.
Finally, after lunch, Sarah and I set aside whatever we were working on and determined to enjoy the beautiful weather. We love to just start walking, finding ravines we’ve never walked through before, searching out the unseen. Sometimes the very process of seeing the connection between known places has the allure of fresh discovery. We headed towards the highway, stopping to marvel at lichens, old dead trees, pine burls, and other secrets of the winter.
When we got to the highway, our property runs down into a little hollow and when a person stands in the bottom of this hollow, the highway is fifteen or twenty feet above. In this hollow, we found a culvert we’d never seen before, with barbed wire over it to keep cows from getting through to the other side. We climbed under, of course, and clambered through the culvert. It is a good sized culvert, big enough to walk through it, bent over.
It was mostly dry, but snowmelt had left a few inches of water in one half of it. We could hear trucks and cars going overhead occasionally, and when we came out on the other side near the Firehouse, we sheepishly and with great amusement saw our mail lady delivering mail at a cluster of mailboxes on the highway. No idea if she saw us or not, but culvert crawling isn’t exactly a “normal” activity that post-highschool young ladies participate in, I suppose. But I find more appeal in culvert crawling than a what the culture expects that young ladies (or young men, for that matter) are to enjoy.
Song Dog Journal 