View From a Prairie Home

by Hege Hernfindahl, Columnist

I wake up in tangled sheets. My body is damp from the trauma of my dream and I am somewhat disoriented. My anchor in life and sweet husband is gone for a few days and I am not used to sleeping alone. I try to remember my dream and lie in bed for a while my mind tries to catch the few strands of the dream still inside my head. The sense of loss is real, but in the dream it happened in the woods at Sibley State Park. Our family of five were walking there and suddenly, our youngest, Erland, was just gone. We looked and we looked and we just couldn’t find him. I screamed his name until my throat was raw but then someone came and told me they had seen him and he was fine. As a lay here, remembering the dream, I realize that yes, he is gone. Erland is dead and has been for the last two years, but I had never dreamed about him before and oh, how I had wished to dream about him! Maybe the message of the dream was that he really was fine. Maybe he had tried to get that message to me and maybe he was in heaven now, with Jesus and he was fine.  But I miss him so and my heart feels physically broken.

The pain is so overwhelming, I need it to go away. Then, I do what I always do when the pain of losing him overwhelms me, I go outside and see what needs to be done. I like to hike or work myself into exhaustion so that I don’t have to think, don’t have to feel. I also love being outside and love that there are still things to be done there.

It’s hard to fathom, but everywhere I look, there are signs that we need rain. It happened so quickly, I think; going from wetness and mud to yellow lawns and withering flowers. In the garden, I even see cracks in the soil. I know that this is a sign of drought, caused by expansion and contraction of the heavy, clay soil we have here. But I also know that with all the rain we have had this year, the subsoil moisture levels are fine. Cracks don’t mean I have to water my garden now. In addition to the cracks, my September garden looks terrible. The tomato plants have some kind of blight due to all the moisture and are all dead or dying. The pumpkin plant has taken over the garden, concentrating on its many vines creeping everywhere rather than producing pumpkins. The cucumber plant, on the other hand has gone wild and produces cucumbers that expand into the size of pumpkins in just a few days, it seems. The onions have all been picked and are in the potting shed on a frame with a screen on it, to dry. But they have been so wet, I have to have a fan blowing air on them and check them daily for rot.

Most of my fall flowers are blooming now. I have so many of them that they compete for space and crowd out the weeds, which was my purpose when planting them. But I do my planning in the spring and during the growing season, the perennials go wild and my spring brain seems to forget to give enough room for the plants to expand and grow. So my flower gardens look messy, but maybe that is the look I should accept.

I also cannot stop planting trees and therefore my flowers don’t have enough light, so they are all lying down stretching towards the sun that way. And they send seeds everywhere which goes under the multitude of perennials and there are now tiny trees everywhere. They must be weeded out before they grow so big, they can’t easily be removed by an old woman with a bad back.

As I go inside to shower, I reflect on my life and all the lives of people out there who live and love and try their best. Nobody’s life is a straight line of orderly events with no worries or unexpected heartache happening. We all have cracks that has to be dealt with and that will mark us as we march on. Life is messy and sometimes wild.