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

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.

Garnet sand

Posted on September 5, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

Out here in the Hills, down in dry creek beds and ravines that have had water flowing through them, there is a lovely phenomenon we call garnet sand. Millions of little tiny red stones will pool up together, dunes of scarlet and purple and burgundy, pooling up when the water is running, then glinting darkly in the sun when the water has run off and the earth has dried.

We started picking garnets in dry creek beds probably a good ten years ago, and each of us girls has found our share of decent garnets. But the fun of the hunt is always there when we find a new deposit of garnet sand.

Most of the garnets really are very little bigger than grains of sand, but sometimes, if you’re careful and if you’re lucky, you’ll find garnets that are good sized, a few millimeters in diameter. The best ones have probably been half the size of a pea. Old timers tell stories of garnets the size of the end of your little finger, but those are from higher up in the Hills, closer to the source of the stones.

It takes a fair amount of water to wash up new layers of sand, and down along the Hole-in-the-Wall jeep trail, on the part of the trail that runs in an old creek bed, there was obviously more than a fair amount of water. Turf had been peeled back from the rocky bottom like bark on a sycamore tree, curled over on itself with all the roots of the grass showing and the smooth stone underneath polished clean of dirt.

The trail has even changed significantly since we last hiked it two months ago or so. Then, it was mostly grass, and pools of water here and there. Now, it is rock and sand, no water. Right below a little five-foot spillway, the entire jeep trail was rock and sand and, yes, a new layer of garnet sand. Most of the sand is like you’d see anywhere but flecked with mica, deposited in a deep drift probably six inches deep in places, new since this spring. But on the top of the drift were sweeps of deep burgundy, brown in the evening light, swirled together with the golden sand.

These little red stones aren’t worth much, but they sure are fun to hunt.

Spring-on-Hill

Posted on August 10, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

Within minutes of scrambling out of the pickup trucks at stage stop Spring-on-Hill, we were suddenly treading very carefully at the sight of a rattlesnake retreating into the old dugout stage stop, and the warning rattle of at least one other in the grass nearby. We tread carefully and put a safe distance between ourselves and the hidden snakes, but we also tossed small stones gingerly in their general direction, just to hear the fascinating sound of the rattle. Finally, it was clear that Mr. Rattlesnake inoffensively wanted to be left alone, so we very obligingly left the serpents to their lair. There was more to see.

This particular stage stop has its own legend of lost gold, and Custer himself in crossing this land wrote of it as a desolate, barren wasteland. Hardly flattering, but barren as it may be in some regards, it is simply teeming with life in others. While drier than the more northerly Hills, there was still water in the ravines and canyons, and Spring-on-Hill itself, the Spring, was actually feeding a small creek, instead of simply soaking into the dry, thirsty gumbo.

We scrambled up the ravine towards the Spring, up and down the bank, over rock ledges, through briars and a stand of juniper, and came to the source, which bubbles up out of a concrete housing. Pipes used to run from the Spring, carrying the water further than it could flow itself, dry as it is out here. Now, it just pours from a crack in the housing, feeding a muddy, mossy pool. Some of the water makes it further down, due to the wet spring and summer we’ve had.

The grass, rented by a local rancher woman, is sufficient to support a small herd of cattle. The cattle were skittish and suspicious, but the heifer calves were beautiful. So delicate. When we marched through part of the herd, one of the cows, probably a younger mama, couldn’t get far enough away from us. As we approached, she’d move away, watching us, and move away again as we moved closer. Finally, with a frisk and a snort, she took off, taking with her a couple of calves and a spotted old steer. Off they ran, not content to just move out of our way, but with a need to be once-for-all out of our sight. Never saw them again.

We stopped for a few minutes by a little piece of red, muddy stream and watched the tadpoles. The sun was warm, and the air was quiet. On the other side of the trees and up a bank, we could hear the cows munching on the grass.

Out on the Spring-on-Hill ranch, the grass is scrubby and sparse, but the low-growing scrub was fragrant in the warm summer air. From time to time, the heady perfume would make me stand up and look around for the source of the perfume. It was a minty fragrance, and we finally figured out which of the scrubby plants it was coming from. It must be some sort of a sage, but I haven’t yet identified it.

Growing fast to the gumbo, lichen clung, flourishing in the barren region. I read once that lichen growth is a sign of a healthy climate or ecosystem. It must be a healthy region out here, then, because lichen grows in subtle abundance. The low-growing, rootless things are almost invisible against the rock and red soil. If you didn’t stop to crouch down and just look, you’d miss them altogether. But they are there, in their reds and greens and whites, defying the harshest of weather.

After our fill of hiking, rock hunting, and exploring, the men brought out the guns and did some target shooting. The women got in on it, too, but it was fun just watching the enthusiasm and expertise of the men in the group. Always eager to learn more, to improve their marksmanship, and to exercise our 2nd Amendment rights. Don’t mess with this crew, I’m tellin’ you!

It was hard to leave–Such a beautiful place, so much to marvel at, to wonder at, to revel in, to savor. God is a God of beauty, goodness, and creativity. Who can look at this landscape and think it happened by chance? I can’t. Someone high and wonderful must have thought out this landscape and planned the intricate details. They’re too exquisite to have been a mere accident. And I’m glad He gave us the chance to enjoy and experience His handiwork. He could have landed us in a colorless, shapeless world. He could have made us see in black-and-white. But He didn’t.