After we buried the ashes of St. Benedict’s Wilfrid, our 10-year-old Airedale Terrier, I was horrified to see our new puppy, a 10-week-old Goldendoodle, digging up the ashes and rolling in them. What at one moment I found disturbing, the next moment I found rather amusing if not fitting. In the strangest of ways, I…
Ecclesiastes: “I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. . . So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the…
“Loss is a cousin of loneliness,” Olivia Laing. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone My mother and Lost Bird, a Lakota woman who died at the age of 29, share at least one thing in common. Both have lived at All Saints, the Sioux quartzite building in Sioux Falls, South Dakota….
I had thought that when I turned 60 I would have fewer questions about life and more answers. But the exact opposite has happened. As my own mortality looms closer on the horizon of life, my field of vision has expanded the boundaries of life’s meaning and stretched me further than I could imagine. At…
Two summers ago, while participating in the annual bike trip Ride Across South Dakota (RASDAK), I spent long minutes looking at fences. South Dakota fences. Which are sometimes different from and sometimes similar to the lodgepole pine fences I helped build in my youth in Montana. Those fences were made of trees we found up…
Winter: Turbulent northwest winds usher in blizzard conditions, leaving Dakota buried under ice and snow that piles along the roads, crusting into white and black. In 2013, winter arrived prematurely when a blizzard blanketed western South Dakota, killing tens of thousands of cattle, horses, and sheep. In one day, the West River rains switched to…