local life

It occurs to me that I haven't been much abiding by the avowed subject matter noted in the header to this blog: local life is not much present. Here is a beginning attempt to attend to that deficiency.

Last night thunderstorms brought four-tenths of an inch of rain to the very dry earth. I was noticing earlier yesterday how the grass had already begun to wilt. But tonight the frogs started to sing again after being very quiet during most of a dry spell in the first half of May. There was a strong south wind all day yesterday that led to near calm and mosquito-friendly air by 7:00pm. The rain came just before midnight, while Sally and I talked with friends on main street, Wadena. The town was quiet and mostly dark, and frequent lightning flashed as we drove north toward home.

The weather report suggests that we may have a wetter week upcoming. Let's hope so. It makes me feel better, knowing that some patterns persist in our altered world. I connect the good weather news with good news about our grandson, Tate. We just got word from our son, Colin, that Tate, now nearly a month old, is doing better after a very scary time with liver enzyme issues. All the events, personal and public in our lives, remind me to remain hopeful rather than optimistic about just about everything. I'm still struck by how farmers around here plant when the earth seems so dry that nothing would germinate. And sometimes their hope is rewarded, and after a dry time the rain comes.

The bloodroot pictured above has just finished blooming. The cowslip is in bloom in the ditches and swamps, and prairie smoke is blooming now too, as well as lilacs and chokecherry. Wild plum is already past. This is one of the best times of year here.

Rain and a first grandchild

Today I am no longer an expectant grandfather. Tate Bradley Robertson was born into this world yesterday in faraway Reno, Nevada. I can't even imagine what the weather was like yesterday in Reno on Tate's birth day, but In north-central Minnesota yesterday was beautiful, sending much needed rain to what had been a cool and dry month. Last night, with the wind coming up, choirs of frogs insisted that spring was arrived. The frost is mostly out of the ground by now, and the lilac buds have greened and are just about ready to open. The talk of the rain here at the farm was a good respite from a week's talk of tragedy in Virginia and foolishness in Washington.

My wife, Sally, found this nice piece by Thomas Merton about the rain speaking with so much more eloquence than the voices of politics and commerce we hear all around us. I like to think that the way Merton hears the rain in his cabin is kin to how we are able to hear it at the farm too. And that, even though separated by half a continent, we'll be able to help Tate experience a little of our life here in the weeks and years ahead.

"The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer. I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligent perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows.

Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen."

first post

Spring is arriving in our latitude. The snow is nearly gone today, and eagles--an adult pair and a juvenile--are perching in popple trees along the Leaf river near our farm. The Sandhill Cranes have been back for ten days or so, and we hear them every morning sing their prehistoric clacking song. The ground hasn't settled yet. We're afloat for a time while the skin of earth remans disconnected from the frozen ground below. I continue to hope that Thoreau was right about this flowing time when he proclaimed that all men's sins are forgiven on a bright spring day.

There are only a couple of weeks remaining till new life change arrives for my son and daughter-in-law. Soon they will introduce my wife and me to our first grandchild. If the world hadn't been giving us news enough about spring, our expectation provides confirmation that the frozen time is dead. It's good to wipe away the crust of winter from our eyes and hear and smell the commotion of the world born again.