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.

What will August hold, I wonder?

Beauty in the Badlands

Posted on May 30, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

The Badlands are rich with subtle life at this time of the year. The summer heat hasn’t scorched the region brown yet, and the moisture has coaxed flowers into bloom. Soon enough, the summer will arrive and the green with burn away, but for now there is a tenacious life that clings to the region.

This past Thursday, Sarah and I took an excursion to the Badlands with two church friends, Roy and Jessica, and made an afternoon of the Badlands loop, stopping at just about every scenic turnoff, and hiking when possible. Although my family has driven through the Badlands several times, never had we gone through at such a leisurely pace! A quick drive through really doesn’t do them justice.

Razor-sharp peaks and spires give way to rolling hills with impassible cliffs. Strata of bright orange and gold layer through one region, while tablelands dominate another. Viewpoints overlook cliffs, plummeting down hundreds of feet into the valley or canyon below.

And in such a hostile wasteland, a no-man’s land, there’s life–Creeping insects, scurrying chipmunks, burrowing prairie dogs. Prairie phlox and scarlet globemallow bloom in the rocky, dusty soil. There wasn’t any flowing water anymore, but the gumbo mud was still sticky in places, and little puddles of tepid water hadn’t yet sunk into the earth.

The rain in the Hills had opened into blue skies over the Badlands, but as the day wore on, we watched thunderstorms roll in. The sky grew bluer and bluer with storm, and the occasional rumble of thunder echoed quietly through the stony peaks and valleys. For hours, the storms seemed to crop up on the horizon and roll towards us, never reaching us.

We scrambled around in the gumbo, climbing to the tops of the tablelands. As we scrambled up over the edge of one, a pair of doves startled from their ground nest. Two eggs were tucked inside. I should have gotten a picture of the location of the nest–The tableland rose a good thirty feet up, and then there was a little washed out spot and a slightly higher table, roughly the size of a dinner table. The nest was nestled in the grass on this second table. The perfect vantage point to watch for predators.

The storm broke as we were eating dinner. Probably a good thing, or we might have stayed out exploring a lot longer than we did!

May Flowers, May Showers

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Laura Lindblom under Uncategorized

“The trees must know something we don’t know,” Sean told me a few weeks ago, on a day when the sun was particularly warm and the sky particularly blue. The trees were budding out, but barely. Baby leaflets cast a mist of color over the trees’ naked boughs, while the garden flowers and wildflowers were springing up madly from the red earth, blissfully unconscious of any lurking chill. Yet April sailed by on a warm breeze, sometimes a warm gale, and ranchers began to worry that the hay wouldn’t come in this summer if the spring dryness didn’t let up. A week of welcome wet our first week of May allayed those fears, and summer seemed sure to arrive.

Growing up in Illinois, I’ve always taken pride in our changeable and unpredictable weather. It is true, weather in Illinois will change quickly enough, often enough, and drastically enough to eventually suit the tastes of anyone who happens to live there. I had notions of idyllic weather in South Dakota, predictable and constant and with the perfect spring temperatures lasting until June, at which point it would just start to become summery outdoors and one could go around without a sweatshirt.

But talk of snow predicted for this weekend left everyone here a little incredulous. The “one good snow” habitually expected in April never came, and May is well arrived! Yet snow we are getting, and with a vengeance. It has already gone from the sleety, wet stuff in the photo to more of a real snow, with white clinging to the grass and rocks and fences. Probably for a born-and-bred South Dakotan, this is more a nuisance than anything. For ranchers, this is downright offensive, potentially interfering with the well-being of spring calves and shipping. But for a native Oklahoman and long-time resident of Illinois, this is something of a novelty. Snow in May? That’s a never before heard of idea where I came from! For now, I’m enjoying it from the window, but when I have to drive to work today in a few hours, confronting a 14% grade, mountain highways, and twists and turns, I might not enjoy it quite so much. And when the leaf-laden tree branches are shattered, spring flowers are blighted, and the snow melts into a swampy mess, I might very well resent it. And if it causes cattle losses and traffic hazards, I’ll hate it as much as the rest of them.