Many years ago, my mother came to join us for Thanksgiving and brought along a DVD that she thought we might enjoy watching. It was a 90-minute documentary about an unknown nature artist – probably a no-go with six kids ages 5-15. We are a polite tribe, though, and didn’t want to disappoint, so we all settled down to watch “Rivers and Tides” about Andy Goldsworthy, prepared to stifle some yawns. And just like that, we were all hooked.
Goldsworthy creates transitory art pieces with things he finds in nature, recognizing that these works of art will be gone with the next tide, or the next rainstorm, or the next strong wind. It was beautiful and fascinating, sometimes even haunting. Sadly, Goldsworthy didn’t acknowledge or give praise to the Creator of all the things he found and transformed, but the works themselves gave God glory. We’ve seen the documentary several times and have tried to share it with others, but so far haven’t snagged anyone else to be part of the AG Fan Club.
A few members of our family have been known to do the “Andy Goldsworthy” thing when we’ve gone camping or been out in the wilderness – some of these pieces admittedly much more droll than AG would have done.
When we were in Grand Marais a couple weeks ago, I kept up the tradition.
We went back to that beach the next morning and to my surprise it was still there. I imagine by now it has been reduced back to its constituent driftwood and pebbles. The passage of time tends to do that with everything that we make sooner or later. It’s humbling.
I’ll probably not even need to delete this in the morning – the passage of time will erode it away.
What you see in that photo is a frustrated mosquito. We were up in the lakes during a time of a Great Mosquito Gathering. They had assembled in large numbers and were primarily interested in my blood. I’m one of those people that mosquitos love. My husband’s theory is that my blood is too sweet and that I need to drink bitter ales and unsweetened coffee in order to have the kind of natural immunity that he seems to possess. I told him I would pay real money if someone could develop a kind of fabric that mosquitos couldn’t pierce. In my experience, they bite through socks, jeans, long-sleeved shirts, anything. The amount of mosquito spray I use seems irrelevant to them. It seemed to be my fate to act as mosquito bait.
Then it rained. I put on the new rain suit that Kris insisted on buying for me for the canoe trip, the suit I told him I probably didn’t need. As soon as I donned it, I realized that this wonderful, marvelous suit was perfect for keeping the mosquitos from biting me. It was made of fabric that their devilish stingers couldn’t pierce. Hallelujah! The rain stopped, but I kept the suit on. In fact, I told my husband I’d probably sleep in it. He thought I was joking. I wasn’t, but as it turned out, I didn’t really need it in the tent. But for the rest of our time in the campground, I wore it constantly, even with the hood up to keep them off my neck.
I don’t think mosquitos were part of the Garden of Eden. It’s hard to imagine God putting Adam and Eve in this perfect paradise and then saying, “Oh, just one thing – watch out for the blood-sucking insects! Ta Ta!” No, I think it’s just as my friend Temple once told me, that mosquitos rode into Eden on Satan’s back.
King David wasn’t referring to mosquitos when he wrote about his foes in the psalms, but some of the verses certainly fit the bill for me and my battle with mosquitos.
LORD, how they have increased who trouble me! Many are they who rise up against me. Psalm 3:1
Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity! For the LORD has heard the voice of my weeping. The LORD has heard my supplication; The LORD will receive my prayer. Let all my enemies be ashamed and greatly troubled, Let them turn back and be ashamed suddenly. Psalm 6:8-10
Yes, what you see in that first photo is not only a frustrated mosquito, but one who is ashamed, who is troubled, and who will turn back. The LORD heard my supplication. Amen!
I’ll probably spray some Repel on this blog post in the morning.
Once again, we’ve been gallivanting off on adventures, this time in the lake-filled part of northern Minnesota that we call the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Some officious people (on some dreadful committee, no doubt) decided that the title wasn’t quite long enough and came to the conclusion that the word “Wilderness” would make it complete. So now it’s BWCAW. When I was young, cool people just called it the “B-Dub.”
My first time in the Boundary Waters was when my Dad took my two sisters and me back in 1974. It was love at first sight for me. I didn’t even mind the portaging. I learned how to steer a canoe using the C-stroke and the J-stroke and felt rather athletic, which wasn’t the norm for me.
When my husband and I were courting, his eyebrows went up in decided approval when he found out that I not only enjoyed paddling a canoe, but also had experience in the BWCA, where he’d spent quite a few summers on canoe trips. My experience paled before his, of course, but qualified me for some respect from him.
When we got engaged, we decided in a gush of enthusiasm that a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters would make a wonderful honeymoon. Who wouldn’t want to spend their honeymoon sleeping in a small tent on the ground? Thankfully, sanity prevailed and we put the canoe trip off until a year later in 1986.
Then we had six children. (That escalated quickly, didn’t it?) What with one thing and another, our paddles didn’t dip into the waters of the B-Dub again until Kris took the four older boys in 2007. I sat that one out with the two youngest of our tribe.
But it didn’t seem right that the two youngest should miss this grand experience, so we went up, the four of us in 2015. By this time, I was nearly 30 years older than the last time I’d gone. I was a little nervous about my ability to paddle, portage and sleep on the ground in a tent. All of it was like riding a bike, although the sleeping on the ground was more like falling off a bike. And frankly, the portaging was made a lot easier because we had two young people to take up my slack. Everyone knew I was the weak link.
That brings us to the present. The two of us just came back from a 3-day sojourn in the Boundary Waters. I was considerably more nervous this time, being the ripe old age of 63 and sadly out of shape. The success of our trip was solely because of my husband’s preparations and planning, and – it must be said – his muscles. We had a couple mishaps and scaled back our plans somewhat, but we both loved being back on the lakes, paddles working together, moving through the water and being completely off the grid. We read our Psalms morning and evening and made a joyful noise unto the Lord.
But we both agreed that the rough camping was getting a little too challenging. And I’m now officially on Biffy Strike. No more outdoor Biffies for me!
Be it ever so humble…there’s no place like home.
Thus, the blog returneth. And perhaps will be deleteth in the morning.
You’ve stayed in AirBnB’s before, right? Or in VRBO’s? Or in hotels? They all have one thing in common: house rules. Do this, don’t do that, and for heaven’s sake, don’t make noise after 10 P.M. In the last year, however, we’ve stayed twice at the most delightfully quirky place with some…er, unique rules and attractions. The address changed between times and the rules did, too. I can tell you about it, but as much as you may want to, you can never stay there. It’s a very exclusive lodging opportunity, available only to the two of us. But when you read the house rules, you’ll wish you were qualified to stay at La Casa L____. It’s a magical place.
Stay #1. Welcome to La Casa L____. We’re so glad to welcome you to our little haven. You’ll find everything you need to know during your stay in this welcome packet. If you have any questions, make sure to write them down, and leave them in the basket next to the desk! We take them out once a week with the rest of our trash. Check-In & Check Out. “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave!” House Rules: The airbed you are using is borrowed, so feel free to eat snacks in bed, spill drinks – whatever! Please remember that we have neighbors in the complex next to us. They make a lot of noise, so don’t hesitate to holler at them if needed. Places to Eat: We keep our freezer stocked with half-filled ice cube trays and freezer-burned fruit. Help yourselves. Our casa is your casa! Things to Do: The mop and vacuum are in the coat closet. We encourage our guests to make full use of them! Enjoy your stay!
Stay #2 Welcome to La Casa L______. We are so glad to welcome you to our little haven. You’ll find everything you need to know during your stay in this welcome packet. If you have questions, just think them very hard as you are falling asleep. La Casa will answer all in time. Check-In and Check Out. Please use the side gate upon entrance and exit. How low can you go? House Rules: The airbed you are using has feelings. Hate speech is not accepted here. Quiet time is anytime Fred and Velma [the cats] are sleeping. It’s safe to assume that this is at all times. Places to Eat: Our breakfast bar, consisting of overripe bananas and their overripe cousins, begins at 4:31 a.m. and ends at 4:32 a.m. Feel free to enjoy within that time.* Our casa is your casa! Things to Do: The list of activities goes on and on. Playing with Fred and Velma, feeding Fred and Velma, scooping Fred and Velma’s litter box…Truly hours of entertainment await. Enjoy your stay! *Any peels left out will be added to your bill.
We are eagerly looking forward to our next stay at La Casa. Don’t you wish you could come along? Those of you who know me can probably guess who one of the proprietors is – I asked her permission before sharing this. 😉
“Our casa is your casa!”
This post is pumped full of air, but if it’s gone flat by morning, I’m tossing it.
So you have a lot of rhubarb. And there’s just two of you. And you don’t need a lot of extra bready carbs like you find in rhubarb bread, rhubarb muffins, rhubarb custard dessert, etc. But rhubarb needs sugar. It must have sugar. What do you do? You make rhubarb syrup!
Big deal, you say. What do you do with rhubarb syrup?
Add some tonic water and voila! A refreshing and byootiful summer afternoon drink. How sweet it is depends on what proportions you use. But that’s between you and your rhubarb. Nobody else needs to know.
You’re welcome.
Add some tonic water to this blog post and delete it in the morning. That’s what I’m going to do.
Owls and fireworks…bet you’re wondering how I’m going to marry those two topics in one neat little essay. Wonder no longer – I’m not. I’m just stuffing two different things into one blog post. We’ll call it “efficient.”
This fierce looking owl has one purpose and one purpose only. It is an owl meant to spread fear and dread into the little rodent hearts of the squirrels that take one bite of our apples and throw them on the ground. And if it provokes some horror in the birds that eat our raspberries, all the better. Be honest: if you were a squirrel, would the sight of this clearly fake owl throw you into a dizzy tizzy? According to the hostess of our B&B lodgings in Idaho, these really work. She had 7 of them spread through her yard. We decided to start with one.
And completely unrelated to the owl issue, let’s talk about fireworks. When our children were younger, we used to go forth to the local park where they shot off the fireworks display in our fair city on Independence Day. It was a festive event to which hordes of mosquitos came to feast on our blood. Then came the fun of getting out of the crowded parking lot. Don’t get me wrong – I love fireworks! The best fireworks experience I ever had was when I was a child and we were in Duluth on the 4th of July. We were on the shore of Lake Superior and the sound of the fireworks echoed back and forth across the bay as they lit up the sky. I wished it could have gone on forever.
As soon as our kids caught on to the idea of buying their own fireworks to set off at home, we were freed from going down to the park. The mosquitos found us anyway, of course.
Eventually, we discovered that if we stood on the corner near our house, we could see the fireworks from there. That’s what we did last night while all of the rest of you were doing it up proper.
I took a few photos of the orange-lit clouds from the sunset and then tried unsuccessfully to capture the fireworks from far away.
When darkness fell and the mosquitos began to bite my ankles, we went back home.
In honor of Independence Day, I’ll leave you with a quote from John Adams about our Constitution:
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
When the owls start setting off fireworks, I’ll delete this post.
We just got back from an epic trip out West. Here’s a brief summary of our doings by the numbers. I’ll probably post more details in coming weeks.
4100+ Miles driven (kudos to hubby who did all the driving) $750 on gas (yikes!) 7 different beds 3 hotels 3 home stays 1 BnB 3 dogs 2 cats 1 baby shower 1 Father’s Day celebration 2 weddings 1 rehearsal dinner 1 speech given 3 parties around the fire pit 50+ games of “where’s the giraffe?” and “where’s the birdie?” (Fun!) 2 coffee dates with friends 1 beer pub with friends 1 hike at a National Park 0 blog posts Lots of love Tons of hugs Gobs of photos
And to quote the old John Denver song, “Hey, it’s good to be back home again.“
I’ll probably delete this when the sun forgets to come up and the moon forgets to haunt the night.
I woke up in the middle of the night last night furiously scratching at some mosquito bites. In my half-awake state, this seemed like a blog-worthy event and I thought, “I’m going to write about this torture of itching.” In the morning, sanity having been restored, I realized how silly that was, but I liked the phrase enough to use it for a blog post title.
Our pretty little garden has begun yielding its produce already. Of course, we’ve been picking asparagus for the last few weeks, but today I plucked a few kohlrabi from out of the soil. These strange looking tuberous veggies look like alien spaceships with all sorts of tentacles coming out of them. I cut off most of the tentacles before taking a photo, so you’ll have to use your imagination.
We’d never heard of these, nor eaten them until about 15 years ago when they appeared in our CSA box. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture and when you join a CSA, you get weekly boxes of produce from a local farm. Anyway, I took that strange vegetable out of the box and thought, “What on earth do you do with these?” I ended up cutting the outer peel off, cutting them into “sticks” and serving them with dill dip. Yum. I highly recommend these – really! And if you want to do it up right, here’s the recipe for dill dip: 2/3 cup mayonnaise, 2/3 cup sour cream, 1 tablespoon dried parsley, 1 tablespoon dried minced onion, 1 teaspoon of dried dill weed, 1 teaspoon of garlic salt. Mix it all together and let it all mingle together for a couple hours before serving.
And on the subject of vegetables, I’m conducting a little survey. I cut open a red pepper tonight for a salad and was struck by the appearance it had. Do you think the pepper looks more like (A) or (B) below?
A. Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”B. Hulk rage.
Vote early, vote often!
Is it time to go already? I really must delete this in the morning before the red pepper screams and rages at me.
St. Croix State Park is the largest state park in Minnesota. It’s also the park that taught me just how out of shape I have gotten since our last hike at the end of October last year. Our hike was to be 4.0 miles, mostly along the St. Croix River, and when I inquired at the park office about the terrain, she said the Hiking Club hike was fairly flat. She also said we might see a black mama bear and her cubs, which had been seen by hikers the previous week. I didn’t bring the trail description booklet on the hike like we usually do and we ended up having reason to regret that. But let’s start out at the beginning, on a sunny, cloudless day around 9:00 a.m. with a temperature of 57 degrees. We both agreed that we could not have chosen a better day.
We hadn’t walked more than a few yards when we realized that a dose of bug repellant was going to be in order. We sprayed it on liberally the first time and more liberally the second time about an hour later. The mosquitos were our constant companions, keeping up that steady whining noise for which they are so well known. For the most part, the bug spray formed an efficient, if smelly shield. But no matter – we were glad to be back on the hike, walking amidst spring greenery with our cameras, ice water, and our plant-identifying app.
It turned out that walking “along” the St. Croix River meant walking on a high bluff along it where you couldn’t see it for the many trees. There were several places that had steps down to the river if you wanted to get up close and personal. I thought we could do that when we got back, an optimistic thought indeed. We stopped here and there to take photos and to try to identify the various flora on our path. By now, as seasoned hikers, we knew that most of what we saw, we’d seen on other spring hikes at other parks. Each time is like the first time, though and photos were taken.
‘Tis the time of year for columbine and after taking a photo of an attractive grouping of them, I thought about how inextricably the name of the plant has become attached to the killings at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. At least for me. A few years ago I listened to a book by the mother of one of the killers which was very compelling and interesting. I recommend it: A Mother’s Reckoning by Sue Klebold.
We also saw a few remnants of burnt trees here and there, proof of a somewhat recent fire there (although it could have been many years ago). And that got me thinking about the Hinckley firestorm of September 1, 1894, Hinckley being the nearest city to St. Croix State Park. There’s a museum in Hinckley that commemorates that disastrous fire and I believe one of the local cemeteries also includes a monument to those who died in the fire. If you want to know more about that, check out the book Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894 by Daniel Brown, which I read a couple months ago.
By the by, we came to a section of the hike where you really could see the river and not far along that part of the trail, we came to the sign for the Yellow Banks CCC Camp.
I hadn’t read the trail description carefully and had thought that we’d see the actual camp, but instead there were some informational plaques with photos of the original camp, now long gone. If we’d brought the trail booklet with us, we would have at this time perhaps looked at it again and noticed that we were supposed to tour the entire CCC camp loop and then return. But we did not. We were relying on the usually excellent HC Trail signs at the parks and there was no sign indicating that all of that was part of the hike. So we decided to by-pass the rest of the plaques and move on. This was a sad, sorry moment.
Taking a break on a nice little bench overlooking the riverVulture? Eagle?
We kept walking, looking at maps along the way which indicated a loop up ahead. Oh, that’s the loop we’re looking for, thought I, having at least remembered that the word “loop” was in the trail description. But it was taking FOREVER to get even to the beginning of the loop and my legs, hips and knees were feeling very fatigued. Along the way, a few bright spots would occur, such as the sight of a downed cottonwood tree resting in all of the cloudy white fluff from the seeds. Remarkable! And then we surprised a group of turkeys. They took flight and I was too late to get anything but an unfocussed shot of the last one disappearing into the woods.
When we finally started the loop, I was excited. This was going to be where we’d come around and start heading back. The only problem was that the loop didn’t seem to understand the concept of looping. It kept going on nearly straight, or so it seemed to me. Kris stopped to look at something and I kept moving doggedly ahead, focused only on getting back to the car at this point. The beauties of the wilderness ceased to be of interest. I heard the noise of a very large animal on my left in the brush and wondered if this was the black bear. It was a deer that came out practically right in front of me on the trail. Once again, my camera was too slow.
We finally reached another map and it was at this point that we understood that we’d way overshot the mark on the hike. Going forward to finish the loop was unthinkable – we weren’t even halfway through. We decided to turn around and go back. I can’t tell you the despair I felt at this, mostly because I was already feeling like I couldn’t walk one more step and it appeared that we probably had about 3 miles to go.
Kris walked a little ahead of me on the way back, which was fine with me – I figured that he could let me know when we were getting close and I was definitely slowing down. Even though it was only 70 degrees, it seemed like 90 degrees to me. My hands were swelling up with the heat, my fingers like fat sausages. I had the idea that maybe if I held my hands up, it would help to “unsausage” them. Kris turned around at some point and was amused to see me walking as if I was being held up.
The way back was an endless trudge, or at least it seemed so. “This is the trail that never ends…yes it goes on and on my friend…” That was the song running through my brain. I made an effort to recall encouraging Bible verses about perseverance. One of the first Bible verses I memorized back in the day was Isaiah 41:10 which says, “But they who wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength. They shall rise up like eagles. They shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” That would have been a good one to rally my spirits, but I didn’t think of it then. Every bend in the trail filled me with hope that we were close to the end, and every bend let me down. Kris pointed toward something. “Can you see our car?” I called out hopefully. “No, but it’s the highway, so we must be getting close!” he said cheerfully. “I don’t want to know about the highway,” I snapped uncharitably, “Just tell me if you see the car.” They say that when you are pressed, you show your true nature. Or that when the cup is jostled, what spills out is what’s really inside the cup. I’m not proud of what spilled out of the cup at that point.
The last flower I took a photo of – a trillium!
Well, here I am typing this up, so clearly we persevered, the trail ended and I did not perish from exhaustion. It took us an hour longer to do the hike than if we’d understood and followed the Hiking Club trail, but on the other hand, we got to see a few things that we wouldn’t have otherwise. G.K. Chesterton said “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” It’s all in the attitude, isn’t it? So looking back, in spite of the extra miles and the fatigue, I want to remember this hike as an adventure.
Afterward, we stopped by Camp Nathanael, a Christian boys’ camp that Kris brought our sons to when they were growing up. We spent the afternoon applying polyurethane to boards which were going to go on the walls of the dining hall. God’s world in the morning, God’s work in the afternoon. It was a good day.
Lynniebeemuseoday 