A Winter’s Eve

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

Even in the last minute Christmas bustle, baking, cleaning house, wrapping presents, doing laundry, the beautiful weather couldn’t be wasted. We finally got out the door around 3:30. The sun had dipped below the hills. Our Hole-in-the-Wall excursion became a Mountain Lion Cave excursion, since the former takes considerably longer than the latter, and we can drive the Jeep almost all the way to the ravine the cave is in.

We have a trail going from the driveway all the way to the cave, but the last hill down into the ravine is about a 40 degree grade and, while possible in the Jeep, gets a little dicey. So we generally park at the top and walk the rest of the way down the trail. Today, though, Sarah and I decided to walk down through the mining pits, since we’d never gotten into the ravine that way before. It was a lovely little walk down the mine, over deadfall, through briars and waist-high dried grasses, in and out of cutaway places where water probably ran during the mining days.

Clumps of woodsorrel and tufts of lush moss clung close to the earth, as green as springtime, glinting through pine needles and scrubby grasses, like emeralds in an antique brooch. Pale grey lichens crusted rocks, subtle and unremarkable, until you look closer. The moss clinging to rocks, like a tiny carpet of ferns, and the lichen crusting rocks, like strange, oceanic life. What variety of textures and color in Creation!

Even in the winter, even when nearly everything has gone to sleep, dormant, and won’t wake until March or April or May, even with all the flowers dead, the petals faded and fallen, nothing but stems, sepals, dried leaves left, there is still a mysterious, ephemeral beauty. Flowers are common to life, something we are used to looking and wondering at. But what about what is left when the flower is gone? That is something we don’t generally take the time to marvel at. But those things that are left are the means of propagating next year’s flowers – In a sense, they are the beginning of the new flowers.

On the way to the ravine, we stopped to get some pictures on a sun-bathed hillside. These silvery stars were fresh and bright in a bed a fallen pine needles and red earth, one of the only living plants still unbitten by the frost. As many flowers as I’ve photographed and identified, I can’t put my finger on this one – I have a few ideas, including Eriogonum pauciflorum, but I don’t think I’ll know until I check on it this spring. Tomorrow, or sometime soon, I’d like to go back to mark the area so I can be sure to identify the correct plant!

The stems of dried grasses and flowers would make a lovely winter bouquet – We’ll have some time before our Christmas festivities begin tomorrow, so I’m hoping to get out to pick a bouquet. Dressed up with some jute and put in a Mason jar, it will make a rustic, festive centerpiece! I forgot to bring a sack on our walk, or I would have picked some things today.

The moon was rising as we drove east towards home. Giant and golden, fading to silver as it got higher. I didn’t have a tripod with me, but as soon as we were home, I grabbed the tripod and Sarah and I headed out again. It will be a full moon tomorrow, a full moon on Christmas. This evening, it was fitting that we listened to the 1968 Apollo 8 Christmas message, a reading from the first chapter of the book of Genesis. What a wonderful world God created, and what a gift to live here.

Tomorrow is Christmas. I’d hoped for a moonlit hike on Christmas night, but we’re expecting snow. So Sarah and I are about to bundle up and head out for a stroll in the moonlight. The frost is thick and diamond bright in the light from the almost-full moon. A perfect night.

Laura Elizabeth

Winter blue

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

The snow wore itself out during the night and the morning dawned flawless and quiet. The sun was bright all day, the sky a clear, robin’s egg blue, and the wind blew crisp. A quick trip this morning to the post office in Hermosa, camera in hand, yielded a gorgeous view of distant Harney Peak. The mountain rose silver out of a black expanse of pines. To the north, Mt. Rushmore was clearly visible, not yet shadowed over by Harney Peak.

The trees along our driveway cast beautiful blue shadows across the road, and a doe stood stock still in the middle of the driveway as I approached. When I stopped the truck to see about getting a picture of her, she lost track of her own feet and nearly took a spill in the snow, before recovering and speeding effortlessly off. I got out and looked around. Such a changeable landscape from season to season. The familiar driveway, the well-known bends and curves of the gravel road, the pines and chokecherry and red rocks are so changed when bathed in snow and chill blue light.

Snow fell quietly from branches of the pines and a four-point buck bounded through the trees on the hills above me, then disappeared from sight. Golden sunlight sifted through the trees, glinting and dazzling. Clouds of powder snow glimmered and sparkled, sifting with the sunlight, scattering to the wind. Snow clung to the pine needles, and covered the red rocks with glistening white caps, and blanketed the red ground. Grasses and sage poked up through the snow.

The grasses and once-flowering plants seem to take on new life in the winter. The color of summer melts away with the first frosts of autumn and winter, but what remains is a delicate silver memory of what was there in the warmer months. The foliage dries and a new sort of flower shimmers in the cold winter sunlight, or peeks from blue shadowed places beneath the bluff. How beautiful everything is in the winter! The remaining silver-brown stalks and leaves and buds seem to belong to the snow, like a flowering blue flax seems to belong to the green grass in the summer.

Chapped hands, tingling toes, and smarting ears are a small price to pay for glimpses of the subtle beauty of the winter. The cold is worth the beauty that winter affords.

Laura Elizabeth

Beginning with wonder

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

As soon as I found out that the Medical Center was closed for the day due to inclement weather, I was out of my office clothes and into jeans and a Carhartt, and on my way up the driveway in the truck, camera and coffee in hand, and Enya playing on the stereo. It was about 7:30 AM, and it wasn’t snowing yet, but it was sleeting little stinging grains. The overnight fog had coated the upper elevation landscape in a thick layer of hoarfrost, transforming the hills and trees and fences and barbed wire. Those common, mundane things were suddenly beautified, enchanted, magical. A perfect day to wander the icing-up roads and take pictures.

I headed towards Hermosa. The view over the home place was frosted and silver beneath the lowering clouds. Snow was coming, but taking its time. A petty, biting wind was blowing, and everything – taut barbed wire fences, delicate dried flowers, Ponderosa pine needles, grasses – everything trembled and quivered before the nipping breeze. I didn’t even catch a glimpse of Remington and Dove. They must have been hunkered down in a sheltered ravine or a stand of trees. Not a sight of them.

Where Highway 79 intersects with Highway 40 and Highway 36, the fog seemed to have been the heaviest. All the naked boughs of the oaks and other hardwood trees that grow along Battle Creek were stark white. The ground almost looked like it was covered in snow. Traffic was scarce and slow. So many shades of white: the white of the trees coated in frost, the white of the ground coated in frost, the white of the sky heavy with snow.

Up and down over hills, I drove in and out of the frost. In low places where hills rose steeply, I could see a stark line where the frost began, where the fog must have drifted and glazed the trees. Iron Creek and Battle Creek were almost frozen over in places. Back towards Keystone around 9:30 or 10:00, the snow was already starting to fly.

I didn’t get home until 10:30 or so, and I could have stayed out a lot longer than I did. So much beauty to marvel at, so many little miracles, from ice-covered flowers to glistening white landscapes. Fog and frost: two of my favorite things.

Rapid City and the surrounding area began battening down the hatches last night, bracing for the first winter storm of the season. Today, this included businesses closing, schools shutting down, and the clinic closing for the day. The snow has piled up enough that parts of I-90 have closed and there is a no travel recommendation for all of western South Dakota. What a great day to cozy up and stay warm. We waited all day for the power to go out. It didn’t.

The rest of this afternoon, I listened to an Adventures in Odyssey episode with my sisters, cuddled Kashka, the black cat, read Little Britches, got an Etsy order ready to ship out, brainstormed about turning blue jeans into denim skirts, and watched the snow pile up outside. I love winter. And I love the chance to wander and wonder, to marvel, to dream, to experience in such a small way the creative mind of an Almighty God by looking at His glorious Creation.

Any day that begins with wonder is bound to be a good day.

Laura Elizabeth

Sunday walks and spiderwebs

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

Sundays always go too quickly–The fellowship, the family time, the blessed enjoyment of the outdoors. We live in such a fast-paced culture, but I’ve been discovering a peace that comes with a quieter life. Sometimes life gets busy and schedules get hectic, but coming home to a quiet life at the end of the day is unbelievably restful and calming. Regrettably, the last week sped by with hardly enough time to breathe deep of the clear, piney air or to ponder flowers in shady corners of the Hills. I tried to make up for it today.

A quiet, solitary walk to scout some good photography locations was restorative, even with temperatures in the 90s. I explored a beautiful little ravine branching off our jeep trail to Hole-in-the-Wall, and enjoyed the sight of birch trees glinting in the 5:00 sunlight. Deadfall and rocks, mossy soil and sandy creekbed–The ravine was like something straight out of a western novel. I love not being able to see what is around the corner–Where might it go? What is just out of sight, waiting to be discovered?

Another ravine, the grass bent from flooding, was scattered with ancient, sun-bleached bones. Some of them were mossy and green, all of them porous with time. Life is so short, so transient. Like the “flower of the grass”, the Bible says, life comes and life fades, just like that. Human life, animal life, plant life. But unlike the flower of the grass, we have a soul that will not die! And God is good to His children. So good.

On the way back through the corrals to get home, which are built with the bare rock as the fourth wall, I nearly walked right through this beauty’s web. I watched as she snagged herself a grasshopper, then scurried back to the center to watch and wait. Ants are examples of industry. Spiders are examples of vigilance.

We were graced with a little thundershower this afternoon, just enough to wet the deck and scare the Dog. She’s a bit of a coward. The clouds rolled up so gradually, they looked like smoke and haze, but soon took command of the whole horizon and the sky above. A little thunder, a little rain, a little wind in the whispering pines. The moisture was pleasant.

Tomorrow is the start of a new day, a new week, and a new job! Off to new adventures.

Blooming June

Posted on June 25, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

The Black Hills are dressed in their best and most glorious finery. Wildflowers are sprinkled, sometimes lavishly, on hillsides and in valleys, the creeks are full to overflowing, and everything is green and lush and fragrant. It is always fun to see the Black Hills through the eyes of a visitor. Even though I’ve only lived here for four months, this has always been our home away from home, and consequently seeing it sometimes becomes, well, daily life. There is nothing like a new pair of eyes to renew my own love of this region.

Mom’s cousin Russel, his wife, and their three daughters have been staying with us since Sunday. I’d never met any of them, so it was fun to get to know my second-cousins from Texas! We all went down to the Mountain Lion Cave last night (or as close as we could get without crossing Battle Creek), and this morning my second cousin Julie and I headed out on an excursion. The rest of her family and Anna were going to Reptile Gardens and, as fascinating as I am sure it is, neither of us was particularly interested in spending hours there.

So out we went to Spokane and haunted the ghost town for a few hours, drove Iron Mountain Road, and visited Little Falls. The flowers were beautiful, and any little hollows or depressions were full of water, frogs, and mosquitoes. The thistles were becoming the prize-winning sort, and mushrooms were in abundance.

Violet and creeping wood sorrels flashed little glints of color in the shorter grass, their heart-shaped leaves green and moist and plentiful. Wild roses and geranium, blue-eyed grass and purple clover, asters and dandelions, all were tucked under trees and nestled into hillsides, along paths, thriving. The flowers and berries were peeking daintily from the Solomon’s Seal, and the lichen was thick on fallen branches and damp wood.

While on first glance not much had changed (it is a ghost town, after all…), when I looked closer there were dozens of new forms of botanical life, flowers that hadn’t been in bloom on our first visit, overgrown and flooded paths, and new clusters of mushrooms growing in the rich layer of decaying leaves and pine needles.

The house looked pretty much the same as before–the broken windows, rusted hinges, rotted floorboards, and the swallow’s nest in the stovepipe–but when on the hunt for details, I suddenly noticed many things that had escaped my eye before, such as the remnants of wallpaper in the house, or the lichen-encrusted nails on the windowsill, or the broken blue Mason jar and the scrap of blue and white wallpaper. The nest had a swallow in it this time, and little plants were growing in the moist earth where floorboards were missing. I noticed “love notices”, where boys and girls had written their names together on the walls. What an old-fashioned and romantic little spot.

Outside one of the windows, there was a layer of shattered glass. My camera is a bit finicky, and after taking one properly-focused picture, it suddenly stopped focusing on the glass. Instead, it was focusing on the reflections of the trees in the glass. The effect was enchanting!

Beauty may be subtle and well-hidden, even when in plain sight. It is hard to see beauty in the mundane when one is only looking for the mundane, or when one is overburdened with the world. A certain optimism is required for seeing exquisite beauty in the drabness of rotting wood or broken glass. Optimism is not my natural state, but I find it exceedingly difficult to be pessimistic when I am surrounded by God’s beauty, and his little gifts. I passionately think we should nourish the vision to see those beautiful details. The world is a bleak place, but there are so many tiny joys and gifts given to us each day by a loving Creator, if we have the eyes to see them.

A Little Rain

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

Every time I drive to work, whether to work in the foothills herding cattle or to work in the heart of the Hills cutting fabric, I’m thankful for being here. But today, the drive was really a joy. The wet and mist and the low hanging clouds cast a spell over the Hills. Familiar landscape was shrouded and obscured, and the breath of clouds was heavy in the trees.

Unfortunately, South Dakota sort of lives in a perpetual drought. Maybe there have been a few years of plentiful moisture (last year, for instance), but drought is nothing new to this region. You’ll know that if you’re familiar with Laura Ingalls and her family’s struggles in the eastern part of the state. Up until this weekend, we’d gotten very little moisture this year. My uncle said that Rapid City is currently about two inches short on precipitation. However, this weekend has brought at least enough moisture to green things up. Ranchers had been getting worried about hay production and summer pastures for their cattle–Hopefully this is putting us on the right track.

But regardless of how much precipitation we have gotten over the past few days, the scenery has been more brilliant, and the low-hanging clouds are mesmerizing, thanks to what little rain we’ve gotten. The damp brings out the richness of the greens and browns and greys, and the frogs were singing loudly in this little pond when I drove by today. I’ve always loved fog–this is simply haunting.