Summer 2018 | In Hindsight

Posted on October 1, 2018 by Laura Lindblom under Photography, Writing

Fall is officially here. October is officially here. I can’t believe how fast this summer flew by. And everyone says that. Sometimes I wonder if there is a time warp or something. It’s kind of fun looking back over the pictures I took this summer, a lot of which I never culled, edited, or shared, and remembering what a great summer it was, easily the best summer I’ve had since we moved here. It was a summer spent outside, spent sweating and working hard and getting sunburned and sore and hiking and reveling in the delight of family and friendships and new adventures. It was a summer of change and newness, starting with getting certified as a Type II Wildland Firefighter at the end of the spring, taking shifts at the fire station, learning about plants and greenhouse care while working at Dakota Greens, exploring new places in the Hills. We enjoyed a litter of growing kittens, unusual quantities of rainfall, massive numbers of wildflowers, and a greenness of the landscape that persisted all summer long. We enjoyed a few family outings, which are rare these days due to Grandma’s poor health, and Sarah and I enjoyed a drive out in the Medicine Mountain area, and found fireweed on Odakota Mountain. I spent some lovely time with the friends God has blessed me with, hiking and exploring and sharing life together.Greenhouse work was a source of joy this summer – early mornings weeding and maintaining the gardens at Prairie Berry Winery, hot days sweating in the greenhouse, cool and rainy days cozy in the greenhouse, days watering and caring for plants, watching flowers bloom and bring a rainbow of colors.As wonderful as the summer was, it definitely had its share of struggles. I tend to struggle with feelings of depression and overwhelm, and I’m in a place in my life where loneliness is a very real thing, and I have to remind myself that God IS good, and He DOES love me and have a plan for my life. I have to remind myself of that, and often forget to. That’s when I start getting depressed and discouraged.Rarely do I get out my camera or work on blog posts when I’m feeling down – Depression tends to shut off both of those things. And years ago I decided I didn’t want to journal my negative feelings, but only the encouraging things. I’ve had people question me on that, since the negative IS a part of life. Very valid, absolutely. God uses what we perceive as negative experiences to sharpen us, to refine us, to make us more like Jesus, and those things are worth remembering. But for someone who has no trouble in general remembering the negative, I don’t need any help with that, or any assistance in going back and reliving my discouraged feelings! I’d rather document the joy.And there is a Biblical principle in this:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. ~Philippians 4:8

Now the flip side of what I just said is that I could and should proactively choose, in the midst of feeling discouraged, to do those things that remind me of God’s goodness and the joy of life, but sometimes that’s exactly what the struggle is, and exactly where I fail. But the Christian life is about growth, and I hope I am growing in that area.But what I love about photography is that what I remember through the photography are the things that delighted me. I don’t remember what overwhelmed me, and I don’t remember why I was struggling or even if I was struggling. I don’t even remember how hot and sweaty and tired I was when I took certain photos, and I like being hot and sweaty and tired. I just remember the delight, the friendships, the beauty. How wonderful. My photography generally springs from joy or results in joy, and that is what I see reflected in the pictures when I look back over them.So enjoy these little glimpses into my joy-filled summer, as I enjoy sharing them and reliving them myself. So much beauty, so much peace, so many new things, so many blessings.So long, summer. Howdy, autumn. The year is wearing on, and winter is just around the corner. A wonderful time of year.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” ~Jeremiah 29:11

Meet Cinders

Posted on September 13, 2018 by Laura Lindblom under country life, Writing

Okay, there’s another cat in the family…Actually, there are three, since Kashka had another litter of kittens back in April and somehow we ended up keeping all three. I have to say, it has been a delight. And Anna further delighted me by gifting me one of that litter. Ember was the first, a year and a half ago, and then this little adorable devil kitten was gifted to me just a few weeks ago or so. I almost refused her, but she snagged my affections pretty hard.
Of all the cats we have had, this one thrives on physical affection the most. We’ve never had a cat that would cuddle (and I mean cuddle) and submit to being held for a half hour or more at a time. I love it. She is terribly affectionate, purrs like a motorboat when I so much as look at her, attacks me while I sleep (one of her not so nice characteristics), and literally has climbed our walls. She’s hilarious.

I’m not generally an advocate for cat collars, unless, of course, they’re town cats and tend to be “about town” cats. However, we now have three black cats (Kashka isn’t very creative with the colors of kittens she has), and two of them are virtually identical, except one is a boy and Cinders is a girl. It is a little awkward to have to “check” each time I want to identify one from the other. Thence, the collar. Makes it a lot easier.

As a teenager, I would occasionally joke about one day being the crazy cat lady (I’ve always loved cats), always attaching it to a hypothetical future day when I was “old and single”, old at that time being 30. I never really thought it would happen since I was allergic to cats at that time, and I really didn’t think I’d still be single that far in the future. It was just something funny I’d say to get a reaction or something, when I was 16 or so and 30 seemed a loooong ways away. Well, I’m no longer allergic (to our cats, at any rate), and I’m “pushing 30”, as a dear relative reminded me more than a year ago. So I think I can say I’ve reached the status of crazy cat lady, especially when I wake up in the morning with two cats in my twin sized bed with me. It makes me smile.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: God was so good to bless us with animals. So much was wrecked after Adam and Eve and their sin destroyed the purity and perfection of Creation. But God in His goodness has left so much beauty and joy and delight to cause us to wonder and marvel and praise Him. Little tastes of Eden.

Joyful Girl

Posted on September 25, 2016 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

One of the things I love most about Sarah is her joy. She is blessed by physical beauty, yes, but Sarah’s joy is a bright and infectious energy that just bubbles and sparkles. She has her down days, like the rest of us, but more than most she has a native delight and sense of optimism. Sometimes we tease her for her endless optimism (think Jane from Pride and Prejudice), but it really shouldn’t be made fun of – As a Christian, optimism should be a given. As redeemed children of God, saved by the blood of Christ, we have absolutely no excuse for anything but optimism! Sarah is blessed with a delightful sense of humor – What a gift. Life is often difficult and frustrating, but the gift of humor is a beautiful thing. Often does our time spent together involve reveling in the joy of laughter and humor, laughing at ourselves and at one another, laughing at humorous or awkward experiences we’ve had, laughing until we cry and are breathless with giggling. If you’ve never been blessed by the sound of her laugh, I’m sorry for you. Some people attempt to exercise self-control when they laugh, which really is kind of a bummer. Laughter isn’t supposed to be something that is constrained or put through a filter. That strips all the fun out of it! And there is nothing more fun or infectious than Sarah’s laugh when she’s not thinking about it – It really comes from the heart, or straight from her funny bone.
And behind her joyful and often publicly quiet exterior, there is a heart of gold. I receive so much encouragement from our conversations, as we delve into life’s issues and struggles. She is endlessly encouraging. Her spiritual maturity is beyond her years. She has the wisdom to be able to take struggles in stride, the creativity to think outside the box, the faith to be unconventional, and the humility to think nothing of it.
I’m so blessed by my sisters. Every once in awhile, when Sarah is performing her rendition of the “Hallelujah Chorus,” I wonder what it would be like to be an only child, but overall, having sisters is a wonderful thing. A gift from God.

Laura Elizabeth

Save

Remington

Posted on December 9, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

Until I look at my photography back at home, I’m never sure exactly how any of it turned out. And when I take my camera and start snapping pictures, I’m never entirely in control of what will be captured through the lens. I may have one idea in mind, but what the camera ends up seeing, or what I see when I look more closely at the subject, might take creativity a different direction altogether. The spontaneity of photography is part of what I find interesting and compelling.

On this unseasonably mild December day, I had to run into Hermosa to make a mail run, and on my way back, Dixie’s horses were standing in our pasture close to the highway. One of them is a beautiful paint gelding named Remington, and with the Black Hills as a backdrop, and scrubby golden grasses in the foreground, I thought a beautiful picture was in order. I pulled over and jumped out of my truck, grabbed my camera, and climbed over the drooping barbed wire fence. I figured on spending a little while poking around in the grass getting pictures of flower heads and then getting close enough to the horses to frame a nice picture. I’d never played with these horses before, and assumed they’d be shy.

No sooner had I knelt in the grass to take a picture of some dried flower tops, Remington was headed eagerly towards me. Apparently the little pony, Dove, isn’t enough of a horse to qualify as a friend for Remington, since the other horse died a few months ago. For the next twenty minutes, Remington wouldn’t let me get far enough away from him to take a good picture. Whenever I knelt down in the grass to get pictures of grasses and things, he came right up next to me and nosed me in the back, or sniffed my head, or just got in my face. He seemed to want to know what I found so interesting, so close to the ground. I looked up once and he was staring right in my eyes, just watching me. If I walked off, he’d follow right behind me. If I stopped, he’d stop with me and wait contentedly. I feel a little sorry for Dove, but Remington just wanted a friend!

Sometimes photography yields things other than photographs.

Laura Elizabeth

First Breath of Winter

Posted on November 21, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

Something about the snow, a fresh snow, transforms the landscape of my mind. When the snow starts to fly, I can’t seem to stop smiling – my soul can’t stop smiling. There is a newness, a freshness, a wonder about the snow, flying and swirling from an invisible sky above and transforming the drabness of dying autumn into the glory of waking winter. The cold ceases to matter. The snow seems to bathe life with madcap delight.

I came downstairs yesterday morning, before the sun had peeked into our hollow, and I was greeted by the wonder of snow. Everything was covered – the rough-cut fences, the branches of every tree, old tires sitting out by the chicken coop, the wind chimes, windowsills, the yellow grader – everything was covered in a layer of pure, undefiled white.

There outside was Anna’s black kitten, Kashka, enjoying the experience of her first snow. She frolicked and dashed madly about, plunging through snow drifts, jumping up a tree, in the throes of delight. She didn’t even try to sneak into the house, as is her habit. As I drove up our winding driveway to work, a few does startled up from their bedding ground, kicking up their heels – the cold and snow and delight of winter had gotten to them, too. When I got home last night, I couldn’t resist a mad dash around our place – T-shirt, flannel pants, and snow boots, the thermometer reading 15 degrees, and the wind laughing in the trees.

Today, the sun is shining and the sky is the pale blue of winter, behind transparent clouds – The world sparkles in the chill sunlight. Delight and quiet seem to walk hand-in-hand in a world transformed: The chirrup of snow underfoot, the gentle chuckle as snow falls from trees, the icy rustle of a rabbit in the tall grass, the sigh of windblown snow on snow. It is a fragile spell that might shatter like an icicle on stone, shaken loose by a mere sigh of a breeze. But fragile or not, while it lasts the spell is binding.

This is the first breath of winter.

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.