Sunday Morning Meds -- A prairie Easter

He wrote me a note that told me I really ought to go out to the Little Sioux River and take a hike up a hill because there was a garden of pasque flowers along a hill I really should see. It was time for a Saturday morning trip anyway, so I made it a pilgrimage because pasque flowers, he told me, are the prairie's very first blooms. 

I thought to get them in morning light, but when I found the hill he he was talking about the sun hadn't even shown up yet, so I puttered around in a gorgeous valley of prairie preserve on the husky shoulders of the Little Sioux, just outside Sutherland.

Old cottonwoods tell stories, but so do these ancient solitary oaks, snarling away, their crooked branches so thoroughly arthritic. But they're there. They're survivors in places they shouldn't be. Down in the valley below is where they should be, but here this old guy stands, making fists.  

It's not a cross, but it is. Maybe the fact that I was going after the prairie's first bit of color, a kind of Easter gift, put me in mind of Holy Week, but somehow this dead pine makes a point of the intersection of life and death, of heaven and earth. 

Maybe it's just me, but during Holy Week, in early morning, the sun just coming up over the hills to the east, everything is symbol. 

Here it is. This is the hill. Down at the bottom an old cement bridge sits. Once upon a time, a whole team of construction workers tried to get it just right, perfectly square. Once upon a time, it conveyed wagons and maybe even some cars and pickups over the draw at the foot of the hill. It's left behind now and useless, telling its own Ozymandias tale. 

All that dead brush along the ridge means someone is trying to hold on to the tall grass. The trees would take over otherwise, turn the valley into forest in no time.

It was a hike, not a beast but a hike, and, truth is, I didn't know exactly what I was looking for. All I knew was that the quarry here was a garden of prairie crocus, an Easter blessing, the very first bit of fragile color in the tall grass prairie, a darling hymn of praise. 

Truth is, I was ready to give up. But I hadn't climbed to the top, so I told myself if I was three quarters of the way up, I was going to at least finish, get all the way up and see what I could see over the valley, and there, finally--viola!  

Little tiny prairie crocuses. You had to look to see 'em, but once you spotted them they were everywhere. 

These little dancers are just plain gorgeous, exactly the kind of Easter blessing this friend of mine let me know should not be missed. Can you imagine the planning that's gone into myriad Easter worships all over Sioux County this week? The hours and hours and hours? Seriously, I think a pasque flower pilgrimage to the steep hills of the Little Sioux River this Sunday morning would outdo just about every imaginable liturgy. While we're up there, a hymn sing right there in the grass.

Have a blessed Easter!