View From a Prairie Home

by Hege Hernfindahl, Columnist

I am writing this on the first day of August. The air is heavy and full of moisture. We have had so much rain. But God saved us from the violent storms they had just north of here and I am so grateful. Only one big branch fell down from a huge black walnut.

The air is heavy as is my heart. It will always be heavy around the 6th of August, the day a vicious form of cancer took my vibrant, healthy son. My friend, Renee, says he passed away. He is a spirit now. In heaven. But he is not here and it seems so cruel that we, his parents, had to survive losing him, when it should have been the other way around.

I used to think, I shouldn’t write so much about losing him. But then I get letters from people who read my columns and say my writing about grief helps them deal with theirs. Or people come up to me when I venture out and say the same thing while giving me a hug. And I love hugs. There is nothing better for my grieving heart than hugs. And when people indicate that I should have gotten over losing Erland by now, I say nothing. I just think they are lucky because they must not have lost a child or a spouse that they loved.

But today, I have a hard time breathing. The pain is so intense. I have learned through the many books I have read about grief that I must just live through the pain, be with it to get to the other side and let go. My best medicine is to go outside.

It is early August. The time for my tiger lilies to bloom and this year, everything is lush due to the heat and the rain. There were tiger lilies all over our little grove when we first came here 49 years ago. We live in the house where Grant grew up and he says, the tiger lilies were also here then. There are two types of tiger lilies, Asiatic ones and the wildflowers. We definitely have the latter.

It grows all over now also because I have dug up their bulbils to add to my various flower gardens. I like to have so many perennials growing that they overtake the weeds. They all lean towards the sun because, besides loving flowers, I also love trees, which I also plant all over. With a fence around them, so the deer won’t eat them. Or the thousands of rabbits that also enjoy our grove.

But back to the tiger lilies. I read that aboriginal people in many parts of the world used to eat them and I also read that they have a slightly peppery flavor and that the bulbs when baked taste like potatoes. But I am not going to eat them. I enjoy them because of their vibrant colors, but I am careful about going close, because their vibrant orange colors make my clothing orangey brown if I go too close. I also enjoy watching the humming birds and butterflies hovering about them.

At this time of the year, we also used to have hundreds and even thousands of monarchs. Around Labor Day there would be so many monarchs on some trees that we couldn’t tell what were leaves and what were butterflies. But there are so few now. I see two or three and am sad and happy at the same time. I tend to the milkweeds we have in our grove and also in my flower gardens. Milkweed is the only plant where the monarch butterflies lay eggs. The monarch caterpillars feed only on the leaves of milkweed, which show how important it is for us to preserve nature with wildflowers including milkweeds.

Nature for me is healing with its myriads of miracles happening right before our eyes even in the most difficult times of our lives. I go back inside to the coolness of our old house and my heart is less heavy.