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Home Field Advantage

December 13, 2020 by Denise Brake 2 Comments

In this year of Covid, most of us have become much more familiar with our homes. Home has been maximally multifunctional for many families—school house, fitness center, workplace, church, recreational spot, and social center as well as the usual place for family meals and relaxation and sleep. It has forced us to evaluate our definition of ‘home’—the purpose, the feel, the aesthetics, and the functionality.

Imagine living in a purple palace with many rooms and secret passageways that wind from place to place. Instead of a protective moat, the palace walls have barbs to keep intruders out. Food is plentiful, at least for most times of the year, and the floor of the palace is soft and comfy. That is the home for a rabbit family at William O’Brien State Park, a park on the eastern side of Minnesota. Most of the year the purple palace is covered with green leaves or with piles of snow—we just happened to see it during its most transparent time.

The woods in Winter and late Fall are also transparent, especially during this time with no snow. Tree trunks, fallen leaves, fallen trees, and rocks dominate the brown-gray landscape. A flowing creek or a frozen lake may break up the muted landscape, but even they reflect the grayness of a cloudy day.

After starting our hike beside the rabbits’ purple palace, it soon became apparent that ‘homes’ were the topic of the day. All forest creatures need a warm (relatively speaking) and safe place to live during the Winter, and as we saw nook after cranny of log homes and tree dwellings, I wondered who lived in each one.

How many frogs are hibernating here? Land frogs dig down or find a space called a hibernaculum where they spend the winter. Aquatic frogs hibernate under water. Both protect their vital organs with an ‘antifreeze’ of a high concentration of glucose.

This little home at the foot of a tree had a super highway of a driveway carved out of a root and acorn debris scattered at the entrance.

A Pine seedling found a home in the leaf litter. It needs a cover of snow to stay protected from the hungry winter-grazing deer and rabbits.

Large fallen logs weather and rot making crack-and-crevice-homes for all types of insects and small creatures.

We chose the Riverside Trail Loop to hike so we could see the St. Croix River, but first we came to Lake Alice. It was named after the daughter of timber baron William O’Brien who bought much of the land owned by the lumber companies who cleared the valley of its huge stands of White Pines. In 1945 Alice donated 180 acres of her father’s land to be developed as a state park.

As we walked along, it became very evident who lived in or near Lake Alice.

We wondered how a beaver chooses his or her next tree to chew down. Was this one coming back to finish the job? It looks like it had a previous ‘old wound’—maybe some trees just aren’t the right ones.

And then we came to a tree right beside the trail—it looked like we had literally just interrupted the busy beaver’s work! We wondered if the whole beaver family works together on the same log. Perhaps they were carrying away the logs they had already chewed off!

We walked across an earthen dam that separated Lake Alice from a channel to the St. Croix River. There was ‘beaver activity’ all across the dam, even though we didn’t see any lodges.

Just across the channel is a large island named Greenberg Island. During Spring snowmelt, the island is often covered with water for a short time. But during the summer, it is a sanctuary for many birds and mammals, including beavers, and for unique floodplain plants.

Our homes tour continued as we walked the Riverside Trail. Little hobbit houses were built into living trees and into those that had fallen down. Even though it was a transparent time of the year, the burrows were covered enough or deep enough that the occupant had plenty of shelter, a refuge from the coming Winter weather.

I like these twin curved logs that span the little creek. Old beaver marks may indicate the identity of the bridge builder.

A couple of havens were prize winners for ‘most artistic doorway,’ both of which named Mother Nature as their architect.

From the rabbits’ purple palace to the home-builder beavers to all the other creatures living in their Winter homes, Nature shows us the importance of having a shelter that is a safe harbor from harsh weather and predators. As for us human creatures, home is where we are.* Home is where we have been for months now. How does your home measure up? Is it a sanctuary of safety? Is it a port in a storm? Is it a haven of love and learning? Is it a sanctum of sacred time and practices? Is it a retreat for adventure and renewal? During this transparent time, when the landscape is stark and bare, we can see things in ways we have not been able to see before. And more importantly, we can act, but the question is are we beaver builders of dams that obstruct and impede the natural flow and goodness of our surroundings or are we bridge builders?

*I am very cognizant of the fact that many, many people do not even have a home, let alone the opportunity to shape it into a sanctuary. Much of the reason for that tragedy has been a history of dam-building. It is an example of where and why we need an army of bridge builders to traverse the muck and bring solutions to people who are in need.

Whose Home is This? Who Lives Here?

October 27, 2019 by Denise Brake Leave a Comment

“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.” –Maya Angelou

I’ve always had a thing about the houses I’ve lived in. No matter their size, age, shape, or beauty (or lack thereof), I have always fallen in love with them. There was the farmhouse when I was a preschooler with a red hand-pump that was the source of our water at the kitchen sink, the huge metal register over the coal furnace, and the outhouse on the other side of the driveway. There was the hotel-like square-block-of-a-house with six bedrooms upstairs (with no heat) that we rented my senior year in high school. There was the Civil-War-era house Chris and I rented in Missouri when we were first married that only had a fuel oil stove in one room of the huge house, had ancient floral wallpaper, and a kitchen large enough and spare enough that it could have housed us and all our four-legged friends. They were all my home for a certain, wonderful, impressionable period of my life.

When I arrived at my Mom’s place last month (one of those homes on my list of homes), I looked out over the pasture and wondered out loud, “Whose home is this? Cows or geese?” The Canadian Geese were scattered from the lake like marbles tossed from a hand. They ranged across the pasture, grazing at blades of grass and tasty seeds, then settled down to rest in the sun like miniature cows.

At this time of year, they were much more interested in pasture than the lake, but would wade into the water for a drink or a bite to eat in the shore mud…

or for a quick swim with their companion ducks.

The cows grazed their ‘summer pasture’ home, making the rounds from hilltop to hilltop.

Nights and early mornings they were bedded down in the grass, chewing their cud, resting and digesting.

The bull maintained his large presence with the herd by belching out low bellows and by watching over and schooling the young calves.

Each species had their routine and their preferred places, but just as often I would see the two groups together—grazing together, resting together, at home together. My Mom said occasionally she had noticed a scuffle between a protective cow and a pugnacious goose, but for the most part, they lived in harmony.

Whose home is this? The cows and calves have returned from their rented summer home to their ‘winter pasture’ closer to their caretakers. Some of the geese stay for most of the year and enjoy abundant food, water, and protection for raising their families and living a good goose life, but still usually fly south to a new home for the coldest winter months. Who remains? The gophers, coyotes, fox, opossums, the myriad of amphibians and insects in various stages of development, and many other species. The pasture is home to many.

I would amend Maya Angelou’s quote by taking out the word human—“I long, as does every being, to be at home wherever I find myself.” The creatures around us desire a safe place to live with food, water, shelter, and protection—wherever they find themselves. And most often, they do so with one another in the web of Nature’s life. They are at home together. Another thing we can learn from Mother Nature. As humans though, with our big brains, we are challenged and compelled even, to go beyond the finding of a home with its shelter, safety, and sustenance. “It’s not about finding a home so much as finding yourself,” says actor Jason Behr. Finding yourself. Finding ourselves. See what I mean about a challenge?

One Final Walk

October 14, 2018 by Denise Brake 10 Comments

I can’t say I wasn’t prepared for it, but the reality of it hits me hard in a hundred little moments every day since she’s been gone. Three weeks ago the inevitability of making that decision pressed against us on all fronts. I barely slept one night, trying to figure out ways to extend her time with us, my selfishness co-mingling with what I knew in my gut was the right thing to do. I fell asleep after tearfully resigning myself to the difficulty of the next few days.

She was my near-constant companion for over ten years—we walked together twice a day—one of those times with Chris after he got home from work. Technically, she was Aaron’s dog—the wanted and needed puppy who joined our family just two months after we left South Dakota for our new life in Minnesota. He slept on the porch with her those first nights, hearing her baby whimpers and whines and letting her out to go to the bathroom during the night—an unusual caretaking role for a high school boy. Then he left to go back up to Camp in the Boundary Waters, and I took over the well-known role of caregiving. Tamba was here every day when Aaron came home from Camp, or school, or college, or lately, from the Cities and his job. They were like siblings—rolling around on the floor, running around the yard as fast as they could, playing all kinds of ball games with one another. She was joyous in every sense of the word when she saw Aaron was home.

When I got up Monday morning, I heard her shake her head as she exited her kennel, her dog tags jingling in a morning song, like thousands of mornings before. We did what we always did—I put on my boots and jacket, grabbed the leash, she stretched her downward dog—small and modified due to her age and tumors—I clicked on the leash, and we headed out into the weather, into the morning, into the zen of Nature and movement. I couldn’t help myself from thinking this was my second-to-the-last morning walk with her. When we came back and she was off her leash, she wandered around the yard, checking out the smells of who had wandered through, but when she saw me, she played her stalking game! She stopped, crouched slightly, head lowered, eyes on me. I did the same. Then slowly, ever so slowly, we walked toward one another, each carefully lifting one foot just as the other did, pausing mid-air, then gradually stepping toward one another until a certain moment when one of us would run! Then both of us would run together, her jumping at me in pretend aggressiveness, me laughing. We spent a lot of time outside that day—we lay in the grass together letting the sunshine soak into our skin, warming the coolness of the day and the coldness of tomorrow. I doubted my decision a dozen times over, but then I saw her hind end give away when she walked by me on level ground. After many attempts, I finally forced myself to call the vet’s office, and with a catch in my voice, made the appointment. Chris and I walked our last walk with her that afternoon, grateful, as always, for our catch-up time together, along with our big, black dog.

Early Tuesday morning, Chris fed her one last time before he left for work with his usual remark: “Happy Birthday!” as the kibbles melodically poured into her dish. When I got up, she and I took our last morning walk, and I felt a combination of extreme gratefulness for all my days with this beautiful dog and a sorrowful dread. Later I sat on the patio with her—I looked at her, and she looked at me with her wise, calm eyes. We had gotten to be so in tune with one another after all these years—I could sense when she needed to go out by her subtle cues; she knew when something was wrong with me. And as I looked at her, I felt like she knew what was going to happen, like she knew we were spending our last moments together. As the time neared, we took our final walk together, the two of us, in sync, turning left out the driveway after nearly always turning right for our walks. We walked down the road, then turned into the woods where lots of new smells captured her attention. We slowly walked up a steep trail that she and Aaron used to run up and down when she was a puppy, where he sledded down the deep snow holding on to a wiggling, happy puppy. It was hard for her to walk up the hill, but she trooped on, like she always had these past painful months. We looked out over the River, then wound our way back home. A perfect last walk.

These three weeks have been gray and cloudy, cold and rainy—Mother Nature’s reflection of my sorrow. A few days offered me a smile of sunshine—oh, yes, that’s what it feels like—just to keep me going: Emily was home for two weekends, and Aaron was here, too. The mailman brought cards from people who knew how much she meant to us, who had been through the same thing. I hear her tags jingling sometimes in the morning, I turn to look at her when I come up from the basement, I reach for the treat can when I come inside from a walk, and I lament going to get the mail without her. I walk in the mornings, and Chris and I walk when he comes home from work. I feel like she is walking with me still. That’s what unconditional love is. That’s what being there for one another does, come what may. That’s the celebration of every ordinary day being a Happy Birthday day. That is her gift of grace to me, and I am ever so grateful.

Nature and Nurture—Who We Are

November 12, 2017 by Denise Brake Leave a Comment

She was a listener from a very young age. Her large brown eyes and beautiful, expressive face shone with excitement, cast woeful sadness, or conveyed a myriad of other emotions, all without the use of words. In fact, she didn’t talk much at all early in life, even when I knew she knew how to do it. Her older sister was a words person at a young age, and with her caring, intuitive spirit, she ‘interpreted’ for Anna. It was apparent that Anna allowed it—she would look at Emily to answer, and I could see the approval in her eyes when Emily got it right. I was never worried; I knew she would talk when she was ready. And she did. It was soon evident that she was an articulate auditory learner—she would be playing on the floor with toys and suddenly sing a complete jingle that she had heard on tv. All of our kids were exposed to music from birth—classical music, fun Raffi songs, cultural songs and lullabies, my singing songs at bedtime, interactive song/story tapes and books (remember Abiyoyo?), along with the Emmylou and CCR records in our collection. Anna showed a special affinity for all music and instruments—she loved the toy piano passed down from the cousins, she taught Aaron how to play the toy xylophone, we bought her a beautiful wooden zither for Christmas, and she would play songs for us—and this was all before she started school.

How do we become the persons we are born to be? How do all creations end up where they are in order to do the work they are intended to do?

Why do the gold-leaved Cottonwoods and Willows prefer to grow with their roots near water instead of on an arid hilltop?

Do muskrats choose to live near the cattails in order to use them for food and building material or is it happenstance?

Rango’s herding instincts apply to cattle, geese, or people. He enjoys his work and takes his job seriously.

And yet, the geese have their own sentries doing their job to keep an eye on him and us.

What makes one dog a herder and another a retriever?

What happens when opportunities for doing one’s work dry up or are never available to begin with?

We live and grow in this complex, multi-layered environment with synergism and competition, support and censure, dependence, independence, and interdependence.

We returned to Brookings to meet our grown-up listener and to hear her musical voice being presented as a flute solo at a faculty recital. Anna is what she has always been and more—a listener, a lover of music and instruments, a composer, and a music scholar to name a few. She learned to play the clarinet, sang and played in church, pleaded for piano lessons, began composing, participated in band and orchestra, learned to play many more instruments, went to music camps and on to college to major in composition. She has written a book and is now in graduate school—all the while composing new music from her creative, brilliant inner being. Doing what she was born to do. Being who she was born to be.

We sat in the Performing Arts Center waiting for her piece to be performed. It was the same place we had gone to school choral concerts. It was the same room where we had sat in awe as Itzhak Perlman played his violin. It was the same stage with the Fazioli grand piano where Anna recorded her first cd of compositions as Chris and the sound guy watched from the control room. I proudly present Anna Brake’s composition performed by Dr. Tammy Evans Yonce.

Program Notes
“Oh Rapturous Hour! Is this Fulfilment?” is a monologue for flute. The poem, “Fulfilment” by Harold Monro (1879-1932), serves as the skeleton for the contour and articulation for the music. The romantic poem has intense emotional changes and the characterizations are key to this piece. I use word painting throughout with techniques such as breath tone, whole tone scales, flutter-tonguing, trills, multiple staccato and key clicks to represent words or themes in the poem, such as wind, nature, laughter, etc.

Nature—our genes and innate gifts, the spirit of who we are when we enter this world. Nurture—the complex, multi-layered environment we grow and develop in. The interaction and synergy of Nature and Nurture form who we are. Later, there are choices that steer us in certain directions, while at the very same time, happenstance—those things we have no control over—can change the course of our lives in an instant. It takes a hardy soul to navigate it all. That’s how we all do this thing called Life.

Traveling Through the Storm

October 29, 2017 by Denise Brake 3 Comments

“And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through….you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” —Haruki Murakami

We left home going home. A tale of two homes, or three or more. We left this home we live in right now and headed to the birthplace home of my mother, to my young adult home, to the place we called home with our three children. And we traveled through a storm.

As stressful as the getting ready to go and out the door is for me, I love it when I’m settled in the car, and the trip has begun. It’s a delicious feeling. Even on the road more traveled, there are new things to see. Even when traveling at 60 mph, I like to take pictures of things that capture my attention and say things that words cannot describe.

It was warm when we left, and as we traveled southwest, the temperature rose to 72 degrees, and the clouds gathered in an arching wall.

As we crashed through that wall of warmth and clouds and wind and pressure, the rain began to fall, streaking the windows with rivulets of water with no destination.

The temperature dropped by twenty degrees.

Like we were entering the Land of Oz. The Land of Oz is a teaching place disguised in the outward beauty of rainbows, bright colors, good witches and bad witches, and storybook characters. It’s a place of fun and adventure, of fear and danger, that lulls us like poppies and makes us forget the purpose of our journey. Until we remember. And then, everything we have planted, everything that was planted in us, is ready for harvest.

Harvest is hard work and time-consuming, but it is what we are supposed to do. The reward is in the harvesting. The benefit is in the gathering. The lesson is in the reaping. The profit is in the yielding to the infinite knowing inside ourselves.

“I’ll be here for you after the storm blows through and your skies are blue again and you’re back to you again.” —Maddie and Tae

Every home has its stressful storms. And with those storms, we can enter the Land of Oz with its fairy tale solutions, or we can pull back the curtain, uncover the fake powers that are ruling our lives, and do the hard work of our own personal harvest. That’s what the storms are all about—to change us into new people, to say things that words have a hard time describing, to see the new things on the road more traveled, and to settle in to the delicious feeling of journeying down the yellow-brick road that leads us home.

Homecoming

October 15, 2017 by Denise Brake 4 Comments

“Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.” —Charles Dickens

An old black pickup pulls into the driveway every weekday afternoon and parks in front of the garage. An old black dog inside the house who’s waiting and watching by the floor-length window gets a shot of adrenaline in anticipation. The homecoming has begun! Chris exits the pickup, gathers his small red cooler and extraneous sweatshirts, boots, and clothes that are mud-streaked, oil-stained, and grass-smelling and walks slowly toward the house. If he’s dug holes, planted trees, or been on his hands and knees pulling weeds for too many hours of the day, it shows in the limp of his gait. But pure happiness and joy meets him at the door in a rush and a dozen rubs against his legs. There is a smile on Chris’ face as he sits on the bench, looks at his gray-faced friend, and rubs behind her ears as she wags her tail in contentment. The three of us then take a walk down the road—Chris and I check in with one another about our day as Tamba checks out the new smells on the old pathway.

It was Homecoming at Saint John’s University last weekend. Aaron and his friends met to eat breakfast in the Reef—the cafeteria on the basement floor of the thick stone walled Quad building. After a short walk across campus, they entered the pine tree enveloped football stadium where the Johnnies whomped the Auggies in a no-surprise win. Tailgating, catching up, reminiscing, and sharing a beer and a game of pool rounded out the day. Chris and I joined Aaron for a hike at Saint John’s the next day—it was a beautiful, sunshiny day, and the Maple trees were in spectacular color. Families, students, and alumni hiked the extensive network of trails, reveling in the magnificence of the place.

What does a place one wants to come home to offer? What brings people back ‘home?’ Saint John’s emphasizes a sense of community and friendship that I witnessed during Aaron’s four years there and that has continued in the years since he graduated. It is a place where you can fall, and there are people there to help you back up.

Home is a place of beauty, however you define that. Saint John’s University is surrounded with hundreds of acres of natural beauty—lakes, streams, Maple forests, grasslands, and Oak savannas—and contains historical and modern architecture that awes and inspires.

Coming home should be a safe haven in the rough seas of life. The heart-breaking reality is that many children don’t have a safe haven at home; they consider school and their teacher a place and person of safety where they can have food, kind words, and care and help with learning and being. We never know when we are someone’s port in a storm.

Home lets us be who we are with no pretenses, embraces us no matter our size, color, mistakes, or shortcomings.

Home is a place to hang out, to get close, to have a conversation, to hold one another accountable, to soak up the good things in life and to deal with the bad.

Home is a place of encouragement when a task is daunting, when we wonder how the heck we’re going to climb this next hurdle, when the steps are right in front of our faces but we are unable to navigate them for whatever reason.

Home is a place of growth and learning where books and experiments, chores and hands-on doing, creativity, mistakes and solving problems of every kind are used daily. We learn, we grow, we shed our old ways and constantly become new creatures.

Home is a place that helps us out of the muck, that throws us a rope when we’re stuck, that will wade into the mess we find ourselves in, pull our boot out of the mud, and help us back to shore.

Home is where all the paths of life lead back to—often we lose our way and wander through the trees. We get confused about what direction we’re going and whether it’s the right way. We get scared of what’s to come because of the dark nights that have come before. But always, the Light of home is calling us forward through the shadows.

For Aaron, homecoming at Saint John’s was fun and nostalgic, satisfying and bittersweet (Jake, you were missed!) For Tamba, Chris’ daily homecoming is a time to celebrate with joy and contentment. So what does a place or person offer that one wants to come home to? Safety in all realms, acceptance of who we are, beauty for the eyes and soul, responsibility of internal and external dynamics, help when we need it, a culture of learning and growth, and fun, happiness, contentment, and joy! Home is the place we return to, it is the people we can count on, it is the God who sustains us, it is the path we travel on the journey back to ourselves. Home is truly where our hearts are, where we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we matter.

What Does Home Look Like to You?

July 30, 2017 by Denise Brake 2 Comments

What does home look like to you? How does it feel? How many generations of your family have lived in the place you call home or in the place where your soul feels at home? What is the history of your family? Is your home tied to the land? Or is home about the people you are with at any given place or time?

We visited Mille Lacs Kathio State Park last weekend—over 10,000 acres near the mammoth Mille Lacs Lake. The park is a National Historic Landmark District. The early French explorer known as Duluth was the first European to accurately record a visit to this area in 1679. He found permanent established villages of the greater Dakota nation band known as the Mdewakanon who lived near Mdewakan, the Spiritual or Sacred Lake, now known as Mille Lacs. This area known as Kathio has been home to the Dakota and later to the Ojibwe people for over 9,000 years. (Stone tools and spear points were found at a site that was radiocarbon tested.) 9,000 years—how many generations of Dakota and Ojibwe people have lived here?! It has been the site for archaeological digs for over a century with 30 separate sites identified thus far. It was the perfect place to call home with forests, lakes, rivers, plentiful food sources and other natural resources.

We began our day by climbing the observation tower to get a bird’s eye view of the park and surrounding lakes.

Loggers removed most of the red and white pine forest in the mid 1800’s, and now most of the trees are oaks, maples, aspen, and birch.

Three large lakes connected by the Rum River could be seen from the tower, the largest being Mille Lacs Lake.

It was a beautiful day for hiking—not too hot or buggy. We saw interesting fungi, five-foot-tall ferns, and delicate wildflowers.

While driving through the park in all its wildness, I commented to Chris that it looks like a good home for bears, thinking we weren’t in bear territory. But when we walked through the interpretive center, one of the displays explained that indeed black bears live in the park! Then we came across this tree on one of the hiking trails—looks like bear activity to me!

The swimming beach at the picnic area was a man-made pool not far from the banks of the Rum River. The only one wading in it was a Great Blue Heron!

In 1965, Leland Cooper of Hamline Universary was sent to survey areas of Mille Lacs Kathio State Park. The site that was later named after him was excavated a year later by Elden Johnson of the University of Minnesota. The Cooper site showed that the ancient Native people lived there from about 500 to the 1700’s. Summer and winter homes, a log pallisade wall, and ricing pits were discovered along with arrow points, stone tools, pottery, and trade goods, including glass beads and Jesuit rings–metal finger rings that French missionaries of the late 1600’s gave to the villagers. This is what the Cooper site looks like today:

Ogechie Lake is a long, narrow, shallow lake that for thousands of years has produced wild rice for waterfowl and the people who made their home along its shores. In the mid 1950’s a dam was built at the south end of the lake to keep the water levels high in Mille Lacs Lake for fishermen. This basically flooded the Ogechie rice crop for decades with little to no production. Two years ago, a new, lower dam was built, and the wild rice or manoomin is coming back so the present day Ojibwe can once again harvest the ancient food.

The land my grandparents called home in South Dakota has been in the family for three and four generations now—it seems like such a long time. But consider the 360 or more generations of Dakota and Ojibwe who have called the Mille Lacs Kathio region home! Home to me is the prairie, rolling hills of pasture, sloughs full of geese, memories of my family. But there is also a connection to Scandinavia where all my ‘native’ ancestors lived. Home to the Ojibwe of Mille Lacs is ‘thousands of lakes’ with fish and wild rice, forests of hard woods and conifers, wild animals and birds, traditions and stories of their ancestors. When we look from a bird’s eye view at our own lives in the long history of our ancestors, what do we see? Were there huge changes to where or what home was? If we are the descendants of immigrants, refugees, or slaves, that would be true. What is the ‘river’ that runs through all those generations, connecting them and us? How do we wade through new waters to make our home? We each have our own definition of what home looks like to us, but this I know: The land matters. History matters. People matter.

Location, Location, Location

May 21, 2017 by Denise Brake 2 Comments

I love this time of year! After a bare, white and gray winter, the greenness seems amazing to my eyes. From one year to the next I forget how many of our flowers bloom in May. The colors, shapes, and fragrances are delightful to the senses. This location we call home suits us well right now amidst the trees, among the flowers, and along with the wild creatures.

In a bird’s world, our yard and woods are a pretty good location to set up house, also. There are eight pre-made houses to choose from, trees of all sorts in which to build a nest, a river nearby and various bird baths for water and bathing, and an endless supply of insects, seeds, and nesting material. Unfortunately, in the bird real estate business, we have a tenacious bully. The House Wren is an aggressive competitor for nests and will destroy eggs and young of other birds in order to take over that nesting spot. Wrens are tiny birds, about five inches from head to tail, weighing only as much as two quarters. Their exuberant, gurgling song is loud and persistent. The Wrens show up a couple of weeks after the Bluebirds, who have already staked out the location that suits them best. Wrens are the main source of nest failure in some areas for Bluebirds, Tree Swallows and Chickadees, but we witnessed some bold resistance to the real estate bully. One of the wren houses hangs from the maple tree outside our dining room, and we happened to see a flurry of bird activity around the little house. A male Bluebird chased the Wren into the house, then perched on the roof, seemingly daring him to come out again.

Then he even peered into the house.

Eventually the Bluebird left to attend to his own nest, and the Wren cautiously popped out of the house onto the ‘porch.’

A minute later, another flurry of wings–this time from a Tree Swallow defending its nest from the scalawag.

The male Wren will find a number of nesting spots and add twigs to them when he first stakes out his territory; later the courted female will inspect the nesting spots. With all the negative reinforcement to stealing the others’ nests, the Wrens decided to build their nest in their hide-away place. Both busy Wrens gathered twigs to add to the nest.

The ground below the house is scattered with small sticks that didn’t quite make it to the inside.

One of the most interesting nest-building practices of the House Wren is adding a spider egg sac to the final nesting materials. It is speculated that after hatching, the young spiders eat any mites or parasites that tend to invade the nest when the young birds inhabit it. Once the Wrens lay their eggs, the real estate battle abruptly ends; meanwhile, the Bluebird stands watch.

I’ve lived in a number of locations in four different states during my life so far. Two of those states are birthplaces—mine and Chris’ and the kids’, which make them inherently special. Each place also has a unique culture—Scandinavian, Pennsylvania Dutch, crossroads of America diversity, and German Catholic. Each location has a beautiful ecosystem—prairie, foothills, rolling farm country, and lakes and woods. Truthfully, I have loved them all. Sometimes it’s not so much living in a place that suits us well but rather to become who we are supposed to be. And places, cultures, ecosystems, and the people we meet there help us to do that. We learn to attend to our own nests, to defend the things we hold dear, to stand up to bullies, and to watch over this beautiful, green Earth.

Coming Home, Going Home

January 26, 2016 by Denise Brake 11 Comments

Thursday we were going home to South Dakota to bury my Dad in the place he wanted to be after dying. After weeks of mourning and making plans, we traveled the snowy roads back to the house I helped Mom and Dad build. The day mirrored my mind–kind of blurry and monochromatic with loss and the grief that holds its hand.

After a warm supper with my Mom, I laid in bed in the same room where I slept until noon on my college weekends, where Chris and I slept as newlyweds before our move to Missouri, where we brought all the things one travels with when three young children are coming home to visit Grandma. Memories of my childhood with Dad flitted through my mind and landed on the building of this house–how I helped put down the puzzle of underlayment, nailed up sheet rock, taped and mudded and sanded and mudded, hammered down the shingles, and stained the siding a red-brown color. Not too long after that, my Dad left and lived in places as far away from South Dakota as one can get–Florida, Texas, California.

I rose with the sun the next morning as the blue-dawned snow turned pink.

Dad’s ashes had arrived from Oklahoma in a plastic-lined plastic box–the size of which made one wonder how a person’s body could ever fit into it. So I had built him a box. I measured scraps of rough cedar board–pulling out the tape, making the pencil mark, letting the tape slowly zip back into its circle of yellow, squaring up a line, and pulling a handsaw through the line. As I sawed and nailed, I thought about how glad I was and how right it felt that Dad was coming home. I finished the cedar box by nailing a horseshoe on the front of it to honor the farrier, horseman, and father who had taught us so much about horses, building things, and hard work.

A small gathering of relatives and friends shared memories of Dad in the Fireside room of the Lutheran church. His old cowboy hat sat atop the box, his dusty cowboy boots on the floor below. I thought back to the many times growing up that I had polished his boots and with a tinge of guilt thought I should have polished them one last time. An even smaller group of us progressed to the rural Danish cemetery where Dad’s folks, sisters, and ancestors are buried. The pastor prayed in the cold, windless afternoon and consecrated Dad to this Earth and to Heaven.

And right beyond the evergreens lining the cemetery along the road is the shelterbelt and old red barn of the homestead where my Dad was born.

The memorial service continued at my sister Sam’s place as we ate, looked at pictures, told stories, laughed, watched the moon rise and the deer graze, and remembered our lives with Dad.

We lost our Dad for many years after he moved away, and even though we were all adults when that happened, it nonetheless affected our lives in many different ways. For me it was sad that he didn’t really know our kids or they him. He did make sure to say that he loved us and loved them when we talked on the phone, so that’s a gift we can accept with grace. So we build our lives with the gifts he has given us and sand out the rough places that don’t quite fit. There is something sacred in the process of being born, living life, learning lessons, and leaving this earth once again. It is remarkable that Dad has his resting place half a mile from the farmhouse he was born in—a true and joyous coming home for going home.

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