All Saints Sunday

Our pear tree is a breathtaking burgundy/gold/orange wonder in the back yard. I cannot get enough of photographing it. It is brilliant in the morning sun; and even more glorious in the amber afternoons as the light spectrum starts to take on the rosy red of the slanting rays of evening.

So my world, my sorry little disfunctional existence, is made splendid with beauty.

Once again I am submerged in writing homestead family history. Today I got an incredible letter with the story of a foster uncle trapping snakes with the South Dakota State Snake Trapper. They worked together with and without traps on my grandparents homestead. One spring he writes, that they took 2,000 rattlesnakes from Table Mountain. I didn't know they were taken to an Army camp in Texas, where they used the venom for shell shocked soldiers. Hmmm.

But, I too, walked the Buttes noted for rattlesnakes and crocus; and I too saw the wire cage traps full of wreathing, buzzing rattlesnakes. They gave me nightmares into my adulthood. Once in my early motherhood in the Black Hills I pushed my third baby right over a rattler in his stroller, on my way to the mail box. A person certainly has to watch ones step. Even city garter snakes give me the willies.

It was All Saints Sunday. We gave altar flowers in recognition of our immigrant forefathers who helped establish homestead churches in South Dakota.