Easter Thoughts

Its Spring time, Easter time. The time of earthly renewal long marked on clog almanacs and calendars, and celebrated by diverse societies for time out of mind. The natural world is astir and the business and promise of life inspires one to activity, and one yearns to make, and do, and to strengthen connections with the old and the new.

Far away in Florida, I contemplate my family in Idaho and Utah, and I miss feeling those feelings on home ground, in my own territory, among the people and places of my origin. Thus is life in a fragmented and mobile society. But thinking of my northwestern roots, my mind returns to this lovely paragraph in which the wife of a Montana sheep rancher recounts Spring and lambing time at the Call Ranch in the Madison River valley south of Ennis, MT, in the far-gone decades prior to WWII.

“For everywhere I look I can see the stir of new life – in the tender, pale green of the hills, rolling on and on to meet the horizon; in the deepening green of slender, silver-trunked quaking aspen; in the sweet, sharp-scented fragrance of pine and spruce and fir, as the sap runs through their branches.”

Hughie Call. Golden Fleece, with Illustrations by Paul Brown. The Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 250 pp.

I have a deep knowledge of what she was feeling. The book is a cherished volume in my library.