Kelly's Green: gardens, books, yarn, laundry...

Back on the horse that threw me

  

 

Deep beneath any cliché like that are stories, thousands of them, but some of them happen to you, yourself. When that happens it gives a you a better purchase on the words; they’ll dance better for you because you love them.

And so it was: I spent one college summer in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and we rode our ranch’s horses most afternoons, going on trail rides with the guests during the lull in our gender-given chores. They were cliché horses, too, well ridden, used to following the paths they knew and mostly happy to do so. (Mostly; some things they just wouldn’t tolerate. The wranglers knew the horses well enough, though they couldn’t always know the riders quite as well.)

On our days off, though, we could wander farther afield, and catch up with staff at other ranches. Sometimes people came to Jackson knowing each other rather better than they might have admitted in job interviews, which is how one afternoon I came to be riding a less-hackneyed horse at the foot of the Tetons, along plains above the Snake, with the chef from the ranch that owned the horses, and the sous-chef from mine, who all were there from San Francisco and connected in various ways to my ranch’s chef.

There was a log, and a stream, and then there was the ground. I wasn’t hurt, and the only way forward was what happened next: back on the horse that threw me.

So what’s that picture of a pond doing up there?

Well, like I said the other day , Occom Pond is open. Twelve, Ten, and a couple of friends spent Boxing Day afternoon there, and I did too: back on the ice for the first time since, well, the last time, nearly two years ago. I skated for an hour, so tentative at first and then better, and when I finally fell down, I was skating past the toughest of the pick-up hockey games and stepped out to stop a wandering puck with my skate blade. 

Stupid? Maybe. Back? You bet.

 

 

 

 

Small boy, big ice

Something about schedules this time of year (the College's, and those of the various town rinks where 10's hockey team practices) has put them on the big ice all week, at Dartmouth's Thompson Arena. (Not bad writing from where the sportswriters sit, either, for that matter.) 

Big ice, small kids: they find each other, 10 and his teammates, at the college games they come to, kids turned loose by parents to circle the concourse, couple of dollars slipped into their pockets, just enough to have to decide between the Ben & Jerry's or something else, not both. They know where Coach sits, too, and when there's room, a bunch of them will settle there, talk hockey, learn to love the game even more.

It's not that any one of them expects, really, to see their picture, jumbo poster sized, framed and mounted along Thompson's walls, in an NHL uniform with a Dartmouth class year tagged to their name, too. Most of them have a signature or two - on a helmet, or a jersey - on them right now, out there on the ice, collected from Dartmouth players and local Olympians-to-be. They've shared the big ice with the men and women who skate for the College; they don't gape, really, if they see a name-and-number from the program walking around town without pads on; they've been behind the scenes, down stairs, in the locker rooms, and come and go onto the ice through the same tunnels the players do on game nights. 

Yeah, maybe Thompson does feel a little different - but it's all just hockey, for now. And the better news is this: the really big ice is finally ready... Occom Pond opened today. Hello, winter. Get out there and play.

 

Snow day

 

The fate of corn

 

The corn is still coming in from the fields around the town near the farm where my grandmother was raised, where she went to school and then returned to teach, and where she returned for the last time when we buried her Saturday morning, beside her parents and a baby brother. In the mean time, she saw a wider world, but probably not wider skies than these.

 

The sign at the entrance to Dakota Ethanol in Madison warns to call first about delivering wet corn. It's been a difficult harvest this year, I'm told, challenging farmers and elevator operators alike. As my farm-raised father said when he saw the waiting grain at Oldham: not the ideal way to store corn.

 

The Lutheran pastor read from John 12 yesterday at my grandmother's memorial service:

²⁴I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. ²⁵The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

 

My grandmother believed those words with her whole heart and soul.

1903-2009

My grandmother's visiting chair, waiting to go to its new home at her niece's house. 

Pondering a life very well lived, and peacefully left behind about a week ago.

We'll be singing this around 2 this afternoon, out on the prairie, in South Dakota:

Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done, in Whom this world rejoices;
Who from our mothers’ arms has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts and blessèd peace to cheer us;
And keep us in His grace, and guide us when perplexed;
And free us from all ills, in this world and the next!

All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given;
The Son and Him Who reigns with Them in highest Heaven;
The one eternal God, whom earth and Heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore.

Backstory: Nun Danket