Morning Thanks--the grasses just outside

Right now, our big blue stem are heavy with seeds, the patch closest to my window sky high, seven feet, I'm sure. We planted them years ago; they're older than most anything in the backyard, but they're still healthy. Then again, this is their world.

We had some worries about the blue stem patches farther out. When these close ones were already shooting up, the patch farther out looked more than a little forlorn. We wondered if we'd done something that had mistakenly brought about an end. But time was the healer. Soon enough the big patch greened up and sent up shoots that today look just fine, although not so tall as what's right here.

Big blue stem didn't really win the west. Out here at least, temperature and rainfall and the fine character of the earth itself combined to create a world where blue stem prospered. Can we call blue stem indigenous? If anything was, once the ocean cleared, blue stem was as native as anything. We wanted some patches as a monument out there in the back yard, the only living monument we thought we needed to have.

If the close bunch could dribble, they'd be D-1 material. They're tall and rangy as a long small forward who can play three or four inches above his height and go to the rim when he can. Their willowy, but tough enough to support the sparrows that, like Robert Frost, love swinging birches.

It's hard to imagine what it was like when out entire backyard, all the way to the river, was blue stem, a tall grass prairie redolent with fragrance of native flowers and alive with dreamy wonderment.

Had to smile last night when I came on a passage from an ancient (1915) biography of the Roman Catholic giant, Father De Smet, a Belgian priest who listened to stories of American Indians and left home, family and country to come to the American frontier to save souls.

There were others like him, many others actually--European priests and missionaries who looked at North American mission fields as ripe for an abundant harvest of souls. What they'd dreamed and what they'd found didn't always match up, and two of them, Father Quickenborne and Father Hoeken, decked out, as always, in long black, holy vestments, set out for who knows where, then wandered into endless tall-grass prairie, an entire world of big blue stem, and just plain lost.

For the record, here's the passage. It's priceless.

the first excursions. . .they were often lost for days at a time, and would traverse the immense prairies in every direction in a vain endeavor to discover their whereabouts. These plains resembled a vast sea; as far as the eye could reach one beheld nothing but a limitless sketch of green pasture and blue sky: deer, chamois, and roebuck were plentiful; prairie-chicken and other wild game abounded. Wolves and bears creeping from their lairs to eat sheep terrified both man and beast.

As you can imagine, this little narrative has to end well--after all, the book is a testimony to God's goodness and his faithful servant, Father De Smet.

But even in such straits they were not abandoned by divine Providence. At nightfall the Fathers would often throw the reins on the horse's neck, letting him take his own direction, and before long would find themselves in sight of some habitation.

Thank goodness--literally. But there's more. There's got to be more, right?

Once an immense and strange dog sprang in front of their horses, and making a path through high grass [i.e. more blue stem] brought them to the home of a Catholic, where they rested and were refreshed and, to their great consolation and that of their host, they celebrated the Divine Mysteries.

It's quiet this morning, almost windless, but the long stems of the big blues just outside my window are stirring a bit, just enough to make them look like those  turkey feet are whispering to each other. 

I think they know I'm talking about them, and they're remembering the story passed on for generations of those two nutty black robes irretrievably lost among 'em.

And they're smiling. Just thought I'd let you know.