View From a Prairie Home

by Hege Hernfindahl, Columnist

It’s a glorious early morning in the beginning of summer. I can’t help it, I must step outside. Since we live so far from our neighbors and our driveway is so long I can hear if someone is coming in time and dash inside before they drive up. I am in my pajamas. My pajamas and my little, yellow rubber boots. Because, of course, it rained last night. It seems to rain all the time now, which saves me from having to water. It also helps replenish the sub-soil from at least two years of drought. I love these morning walks in the summers. I walk and look at all the flowers, coffee cup in hand. Mostly they are perennials. Hardy perennials planted long ago when I first moved here or even longer ago by my mother-in-law or even Mildred, the lady who lived here first.

I contemplate this first. The long-ago planted perennials. By our little white shed, built in 1880 it says on the inside wall, there is a bush with tiny yellow roses that smell so good. Like all of the perennials they are hardy. They have survived some very brutal Minnesota winters. They have survived droughts and wet years. Still they bloom. But only for a short time. In early June. If I pick one and bring it in, it never lasts more than a few hours. Just like the wild roses I find along the many country roads in the summer.

My dear friend Helen, departed now, like so many, singing with the angels, even though she couldn’t carry a tune, used to pick those roses as she walked along the country roads. She would pick them and hold them up to her nose as she walked. How I miss her. Even her frank and sometimes hurtful words, which I forgave, because only Helen was Helen. I have dug up some wild roses and planted them by our little pond. For Helen, my sometime soulmate.

The Korean lilacs are also blooming. As lilacs go, they are late bloomers, but their smell! Impossible to describe. Knowing this, I planted them by our little deck which faces west. I sat there, smelling them, when I found out Patrick, my son-in-law, had died of a so-called widow-maker hear attack. It still hurts so much my heart always breaks when I smell those lilacs. But one must feel the pain of loss to be able to go on living.

Out in the woods, where Patrick liked to practice his bow and arrow hunting, wild flowers are growing. Some are invasive, but who cares. They are pretty; wild phlox, daisies and violets of all kinds. The latter wants to take over my perennial beds and I weed them out as I talk to them about where they should grow. Somehow, it doesn’t help. But talking to flowers is good for my soul. Flowers don’t care if my small-talk ability is lacking. They just nod their heads in the slight summer breeze.

Talking about nodding heads, I walk over to my orange poppies. I planted them for Patrick and Ingvild’s garden wedding in 2001. They are so beautiful, it makes my heart sing. And I must enjoy them, because soon, they too, will wither and die. I also remember the poppies at the World War One museum in Kansas City. A field of red poppies, meant to remind us of the poppies that grew in the battlefields of World War One. The artillery shells shot from the many trenches of this war, churned up the soil and brought the seeds of the poppies to the surface. The nitrogen of the explosives also fertilized the earth and gave the poppies nutrients to thrive and bloom. So amid the horror of trench warfare, with the screams of bombs and men dying, poppies grew. Poppies, a reminder of the beauty, yet brevity of life.