Winter bouquets

Posted on December 25, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

Even after the flowers fade, in what is left there is so much variety of texture, so many shades of brown and tan and silver and gold, such strange symmetry and asymmetry, such a spectrum of design. Winter bouquets are the perfect way to showcase the subtle beauty of the season. Sarah and I headed this morning towards the mines where we were hiking yesterday, armed with scissors and sacks and our cameras, to go a-gathering.

It didn’t take long for us to fill our sacks, and it took less time than that for us to be already running late to help with Christmas dinner. Nevertheless, we gathered plenty – Heads of bee balm, little blue stem, coneflower tops, dead spikes of hairy verbena, and other grasses. We stopped once or twice on the way back to cut some yellow rabbitbrush, which seems to grow more on the open hill sides and hill tops, than in ravines.

Mason jars are perfect as vases, and heaven knows we have plenty of Mason jars all over the place! I thought about using some of the old blue jars, but I think the clear glass ones are less obtrusive, for this sort of bouquet. I filled the bottom of the larger jar with pieces of lichen and moss-covered bark. Adding a jute bow, they became festive centerpieces. Jute is like burlap – Rustic, serviceable, and delicately beautiful in its drabness.

It is something of an exercise in simplicity.

And I like simplicity.

Laura Elizabeth

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

Refreshing the Soul

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

Some weeks are hard – hard to keep smiling, hard to see the beauty of life, and for no good reason. This has been one of those weeks, and the last few days in particular have been a struggle emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. What can happen from one week to the next that can make my life, which I know very well is so much better than I deserve, suddenly seem bleak, or frustrating, or exhausting?

That change is usually something in my heart, something in my inner self, that has become disconnected and out of joint. Knowing myself to be a very dedicated introvert, I recognize that part of my struggle has been the sheer level of activity that takes me outside of my sphere, outside of my cozy home life, without sufficient time to recharge myself. But I realized something else – Not only has there been no time for solitude this past week and a half or so, but I haven’t spent time in God’s wonderful Creation, which is one place that never fails to refresh my awareness of beauty, blessings, and life’s bounty. Time spent in God’s Creation always seems to renew my sense of perspective. Being an introvert, I spend a lot of time lost inside my own thoughts. When my thoughts are tuned to God’s goodness and to beauty and joy, my thoughts are a wonderful place to be. But when my thoughts are in a turmoil, perspective is almost impossible to have. What better way to get out of my own tumultuous thoughts, than to lose myself in discovering the joys of God’s Creation?

After church today, the girls and I went on a hike. We left later than we intended to, since we got sidetracked cleaning the loft, so we thought our hike would end up being truncated. Our goal had been to get to Hole-in-the-Wall, which we decided against because of the time, so instead we decided to explore the ravines and draws spiderwebbing off our well-worn jeep trail.

Clambering over deadfall and under deadfall, scrambling through steep ravines, down ledges as tall as we are, slipping and sliding over week-old snow still clinging to the shadowed places, carefully parting barbed wire fences to fit through between the strands of wire, laying prone in the stiff, brown grass to marvel at a pinecone, or at the funny little spiked heads of what were in the summer Wild Bergamot – What a delight!

Flickers of white gave away the silently fleeing deer, and Dixie’s black pony could be glimpsed in our east pasture when we came out on top into a meadow. As beautiful as was the view while in the meadow, with Grandma’s driveway in the distance and Harney Peak away on the horizon, I like the ravines the best. The cool shadows, the piles of deadfall blocking the way, the snow and ice in pools at the bottom, the sense of the unknown – What is around the next bend? Where will this ravine take us?

In all the time we’ve been out here, there are still places I haven’t explored. The unknown, unfollowed, un-searched-out ravines. The distant hilltop. The dry creekbed. If I climb that hill, what will be on the other side? What is this stand of trees hiding? What is at the end of this draw? Should I go left or right?

It is impossible to stay lost in my tumultuous thoughts when God is drawing my thoughts out of myself, into something so much more beautiful than I have a capacity to understand or contain or express.

The afternoon gave way to evening. The clouds shone, and the red earth seemed to soak up every ray of light and cast it off again, luminous in the strange golden light of sunset. Then sunset gave way to dusk, and the red-gold gave way to the colors of nighttime. Lavender shadows settled into the ravines, and the clouds became the soft grey of slumber.

Almost as swiftly as the last glow faded from the sky, the warmth settled out of the air. A delicious chill sifted between the trees. The breeze picked up ever so slightly.

December is a beautiful time of year. But any time spent out in the open, breathing deep of the freshness of the earth, anytime spent marveling at God’s wonders is sure to be medicine to the weary soul.

It was.

Laura Elizabeth