This Week in Iowa Nature

Bobcat sightings are on the increase in rural, forested areas of the state. Look for their tracks and those of other animals while you snowshoe and ski cross-country.

The Iowa Nature Calendar, by Jean Prior and James Sandrock

Plant of the Week

Water hemlock

Cicuta maculata L.

other common names: beaver poison, cowbane, musquash root, spotted cowbane, spotted hemlock

Cicuta: the ancient Latin name for poison hemlock

Maculata: from Latin, meaning “spotted” or “mottled”

Parsley family: Apiaceae (Umbelliferae)

Photograph by Thomas Rosburg, Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie: The Upper Midwest, Second Edition

Holiday Post from Christmas on the Great Plains

 From "Making Bows" by Ted Kooser

In the weeks just before Christmas, my father’s store was busiest, its narrow aisles crowded with shoppers, its carefully arranged displays rumpled and disarrayed, and its floors slippery with melting snow. On Saturdays and when school let out in the afternoons, my sister and I helped out. She worked on the sales floor, and I made bows for the women in the gift-wrap booth.

The bow machine was set up in the furnace room. A single lightbulb hung over the card table upon which it sat. Behind my chair, the great gray furnace sighed and ticked, and piles of bald and disassembled manikins watched my back with wide unblinking eyes. In the shadows, bugs rustled across the floor, and above me the footfalls of customers knocked up and down the wooden floor. There I wound green and red satin ribbon into shiny bows that I dropped into a big cardboard box beside me. It was a job like those in fairy tales, in which a child is imprisoned in a castle and made to spin golden thread from flax straw.

Christmas on the Great Plains, edited by Dorothy Dodge Robbins and Kenneth Robbins
Art by Claudia McGehee 

Holiday Post from Christmas on the Great Plains

 From "What I Took from Minnesota Christmases" by Rosanne Nordstrom

Before I married Roger, he often talked about the many times during his childhood when his family had gone to St. Paul, Minnesota, for Christmas. His stories sounded like the Christmas celebrations I’d always wished my family could have: lots of people who enjoyed each other in a beautiful house with good food. “Usually,” he said, “we arrived on the evening of the twenty-second or twenty-third and had a lutefisk dinner at my grandmother’s.”
     “You had what?”
     “Lutefisk. It’s cod cured in lye.”
     “You’re kidding me. Wouldn’t that be dangerous to eat?”
     “Nah, Rose, it’s delicious. My father, brother, and I have contests to see who can eat the most. That meal is the beginning of the Christmas feasts.”
     “What do you do on Christmas Eve?”
     “We go to my uncle’s house. That’s where all my cousins live. My grandmother and at least one of her sisters come also. It’s a good thing my uncle has a really long dining room table.”
     “And you eat?”
     “Reindeer.”
     “No. I don’t believe it.”
     “Well, we did have it once. We always have Swedish meatballs and potatoes, loganberries, a vegetable or two, sausage, and limpa. Sometimes we have fruit soup, and my aunt really did serve reindeer. She’s Finnish. Maybe that was part of her family’s Christmas. For dessert there is always rice pudding and homemade cookies.”
     “Well, except for the reindeer meat, which I wouldn’t think of eating— that would be like eating Rudolph—the Christmas Eve meal sounds pretty tasty.”

Christmas on the Great Plains, edited by Dorothy Dodge Robbins and Kenneth Robbins
Art by Claudia McGehee

Little bluestem - Art by Claudia McGehee

Little bluestem, Schizachyrium scoparium

Little bluestem is abundant in the tallgrass prairie. In the fall, its rich rusty color makes the prairie glow.

Claudia McGehee, A Tallgrass Prairie Alphabet

Holiday Post from Christmas on the Great Plains

From "An Iowa Christmas" by Paul Engle

Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we lived in a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where there were no churches. My bells were on my father’s team of horses as he drove up to our horse-headed hitching post with the bobsled that would take us to celebrate Christmas on the family farm ten miles out in the country. My father would bring the team down Fifth Avenue at a smart trot, flicking his whip over the horses’ rumps and making the bells double their light, thin jangling over the snow, whose radiance threw back a brilliance like the sound of bells.

There are no such departures any more: the whole family piling into the bobsled with a foot of golden oat straw to lie in and heavy buffalo robes to lie under, the horses stamping the soft snow, and at every motion of their hoofs the bells jingling, jingling. My father sat there with the reins firmly held, wearing a long coat made from the hide of a favorite family horse, the deep chestnut color still glowing, his mittens also from the same hide. It always troubled me as a boy of eight that the horses had so indifferent a view of their late friend appearing as a warm overcoat on the back of the man who put the iron bit in their mouths.

There are no streets like those any more: the snow sensibly left on the road for the sake of sleighs and easy travel. We could hop off and ride the heavy runners as they made their hissing, tearing sound over the packed snow. And along the streets we met other horses, so that we moved from one set of bells to another, from the tiny tinkle of the individual bells on the shafts to the silvery, leaping sound of the long strands hung over the harness. There would be an occasional brass-mounted automobile laboring on its narrow tires and as often as not pulled up the slippery hills by a horse, and we would pass it with a triumphant shout for an awkward nuisance which was obviously not here to stay.

Excerpt taken from Christmas on the Great Plains, edited by Dorothy Dodge Robbins and Kenneth Robbins
Art by Claudia McGehee

Upcoming Interview: Robert & Linda Scarth on Talk of Iowa

Tune in this Thursday morning to hear an interview with Robert and Linda Scarth, authors and photographers of Deep Nature: Photographs from Iowa.

Date: Thursday, December 2
Time: 10:00 AM CST
Location: Your radio: tune in to Iowa Public Radio's "Talk of Iowa"