Relics

Posted on October 11, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

I’m sure I don’t know all the stories of this old boy, but he’s become something of a fixture. I can’t even say I really know when Grandpa managed to come by this old Willys jeep, or how long he drove it, but it sat as a creative, backwoods yard ornament next to the chicken coop for years. Years.

Within the past few, though, maybe ten years, maybe five, the old Willys jeep was retired to a pen next to the corral. Can’t even be used for parts, but for some reason, there just is no getting rid of that old thing. None of us wants to, I imagine.

Even if I don’t remember the details, or never knew them to forget them, there’s something to be said for relics of the past. I don’t know if it is the reminder that everything eventually falls to disrepair (pessimistic) or it is the reminder of good old days, and people I loved (optimistic), but there is something important to me about the rusted body, the peeling paint, the almost-unreadable “Willys” on the hood and the back, the cracked windshield, the springs busting through the cracked leather seats.

It is a part of my dad’s past, my granddad’s past, which makes it a part of my past. If this place were mine to do with as I wished, the jeep would stay. In fact, I’d probably put it back next to the chicken coop.

Who knows when it got the yellow paint job – The green is visible under the cracking, chipping, lichen-covered paint. Who knows when the mice really took to the leather, or when the yellow jackets started taking refuge there – They sun themselves on the remainder of the seats, on the floorboards. Who could tell me the last day that old clunker was driven, or what its last trip was – I can’t even tell you the day it was retired to the the pen beside the corral.

But it is a relic. And it will stay.

Surprised by bounty

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

The sentiment this summer among gardeners was dismal. Just when we started thinking this year would be a great year for gardening, a storm whipped up out of nowhere and smashed everything. So we replanted and waited and got hopeful – And just when we started getting optimistic, another stormed whipped up out of nowhere and smashed everything. Again. It was a little discouraging. Who wouldn’t be dismal when their beautiful garden gets crushed by pea-to-golfball-sized hail, knocked down by straight-line winds, flooded out, shriveled in the heat, or burned by an early frost?

But suddenly we’ve been surprised by our garden actually producing vegetables, in spite of the late (third or fourth) planting. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but Sarah’s boss at Dakota Greens in Custer gave – gave – us upwards of 20 tomato plants, after the first planting was smashed, plus a variety of pepper plants. Such a gesture of generosity really floored me.

Mom dutifully and eagerly planted them, regardless of how late in the season it was, content to have a garden that looked nice even if it didn’t ultimately grow anything. Someone else gave us a tomatillo plant which is now covered with fruit, other people gave us zucchini plants, and Mom replanted green beans.

But what has been delightfully surprising is that not only did the plants that she planted late do well, but many of the plants that had gotten flattened or severely bruised in the hail are doing beautifully! Mom’s square-foot gardening boxes were planted thick with root vegetables, and we’re getting a bumper crop of turnips. I couldn’t help but marvel at the color – Such a rich, pure color. The basil and oregano likewise are plentiful, and many of the squash plants are laden.

What a welcome surprise! We have bags of green beans waiting to be blanched and frozen, lots of turnips, and herbs to freeze in oil. How exciting!

We were out picking a few days ago, and Luna the Cat was darling to watch – He’s a weird cat with some really weird habits and weird quirks, but he is quite the charmer. He is uncannily companionable, although he prefers to not be snuggled, but he loves to be where the activity is. The whole time we picked, he was discovering the garden. He sneaked up on picked zucchini, prowled around in the green beans, got his little paws wet in puddles, and then discovered the leeks. He likes leeks.

Our tomato crop hasn’t been very good, since a late hail storm damaged a lot of the fruit, but the lack in tomatoes is more than made up for in the other bounty. We’re still pondering what we could use as a hail screen next year.

Lesson for the day: Patience and persistence really does pay off sometimes. If Mom hadn’t insisted on replanting the third (or was it the fourth?) time and continuing the cultivate what survived, we wouldn’t be getting anything from the garden this year, except maybe some of the root crops and some squash. But we’ll have a little to put up in the freezer anyway, and plenty to cook fresh. Nothing quite makes a meal like home-grown produce.

September | In Hindsight

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

September was a month I knew I would be glad to leave behind, before it even started. Now, it wasn’t bad, mind you – It was just busy. Way too busy. I was working six days a week through most of September, on one occasion seven days a week, and I knew it would be unsustainable before it had even become unsustainable. Either way, September is over, taking with it the last of my summer jobs, the last of the summer, the last of the tourists, and leaving behind memories of family outings, photography excursions, time spent with my church community, and the first few weeks at a brand-new job in a brand new field.

The scribing is going well – I have to be honest, after a week doing it I was getting worried. The amount to learn was daunting and, as I alluded to, I don’t thrive in bustle and busyness. There was a period of about two weeks where I had one day off, maybe two, since I was still working at the Mercantile. Let’s just say that that isn’t conducive to feeling good about a brand new job. However, as I got more familiar at the clinic, I started to enjoy it – to really enjoy it. There’s so much to learn, which is both a little daunting and a lot exciting. Looking forward to seeing what the next year looks like.

September is the perfect place on the summer calendar, as far as weather is concerned – Great weather for hiking and walks, for exploring and spending time outdoors. I was (and still am!) getting to know my new camera, which I bought right at the beginning of September – It comes with me just about everywhere! Somehow in the craziness of September, I was blessed to have time for garnet hunts, scenic drives, photography, hiking with friends, picking rose hips, going to Little Falls, visiting the Stavkirk, driving Spearfish Canyon, going to the Rock Maze out on Nemo Road, and spending the evening up at Grandma’s watching “Little House on the Prairie.”

I taught my first Sunday school class at church, played preludes for the month of September, AND now have an electric piano. I have to admit, I turned up my nose at having one for a very long time–But not having any piano finally became motivation enough to accept an electric one. I have the best dad–He bought the piano, and I know we’ll be using it a lot in the future for hymn-sings and making music up at Grandma’s! It isn’t a real piano, but it actually sounds amazingly good.

And finally, Jess visited at the end of the month, along with our Uncle Scott. We monopolized his time as much as we were able – I never get the feeling that he minds being monopolized. Although we didn’t have a lot of time off while Jess was here, we made the most of what free time we did have – Already looking forward to seeing her next month, and at Christmas time.

Even in the midst of the busyness, September had lovely moments of family time, adventures, and just plain fun–They were just a little fewer and farther between this month, or a little more meticulously stitched in to the fabric of the month. But it made them all the more appreciated.

Sisters

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

Jess was here to visit this past week – We kept her busy, scurrying her around from one adventure to another, relishing having all four of us together again. That may sound sappy to some, but if you grew up as we did in a close-knit homeschooling household, you’ll understand what I mean when I say, “My sisters are my bestest friends. They are all I need.” When you grow up spending all of your waking hours with your family, there is a closeness that is inevitable. And it is hard having one of those siblings 1000 miles away. So glad she got to come to the Hills for a week, short as it was.

On Saturday, the 19th, we took a jaunt over to Little Falls – The girls wanted to swim, which was a firm no for me, but they managed to talk me into getting in up to my knees. I don’t handle cold water very well, so I was whining the whole time about my feet hurting (they did. The water was cold.), but we managed to get a couple of cute pictures on Jess’s phone.

Anna spent most of her time garnet hunting. As I’ve written about once or twice before, garnets are plentiful in the streams here and, while we mostly hunt them in the dry creek beds, we like to hunt them whenever we go to Little or Big Falls. Some good garnets can be found in those places…

Jess, Sarah, and the Dog scrambled around on the rocks – I followed behind slowly, enjoying my time through the lens of a camera, and simply enjoying the presence of all three of my sisters.

God has blessed me with wonderful friends in my sisters. When I was younger, I don’t think I appreciated them nearly enough, but they grow more dear to me with each passing year. They are the lights of my life. Not sure what I’d do without them. While siblings are so close that you know one another’s foibles, quirks, and annoying habits, they also are the friends who have the potential to be the closest friends on earth.

Who else shares the same history, the same upbringing, the same genetics or legal heritage? My youngest sister, Anna, is adopted, but even though she doesn’t share my genes, she shares a heritage by virtue of us being children of the same parents. She participates in the legacy that our parents are building for us.

We’ve all spent all of our childhoods together. We’ve been homeschooled together, we’ve argued together, shared beds, brushed teeth together, owned pets together, accidentally killed pets together, shared silverware, shared secrets, shared deodorant, spent all our best memories together. We’ve shared mishaps, successes, and failures. We share facial expressions, complexions, and quirks. We compare tans in the summer. We fight over snow boots in the winter. We all try to get out of dishes, and then enjoy doing the dishes together.

Who else can boast or blush at the mention of each of those things? Who else can claim the closeness that siblings have? We share a past, a present, and a future. A friend can walk away without a part of you going with them. Your siblings, no matter how rocky the relationship, are always going to be part of who you are.

When God created families, he wasn’t just creating an institution – He was creating companions, opportunities to experience closeness probably only surpassed by a spouse. That’s a pretty special relationship. And I’ve got three of them.

Roseberries

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

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.

July | In Hindsight

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

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.