Things My Mother Taught Me

My mother is never far from my mind. This weekend was a little difficult, I was really missing her. Sundays are the hardest because we used to try to get out and do something fun together before she became too sick to leave the house anymore. This past Sunday was a beautiful day, and it got me to thinking about some photos I took the day after her funeral. I had taken a drive that day to her favorite places before heading home. I guess I wasn’t quite read to begin life without her just yet. So I traveled about that day.   One of those places was the Loess Hills.

Stopping at different places we used to go.

She loved those hills,  having grown up in them, and she love to go to an overlook  in the hills, where you could see for miles. There she would always recite to me the history of their geology. She would tell me how this particular chain of Loess is unlike any other in the country. “When you think of Iowa and Nebraska,” she would say, “you think of flat plains and rolling fields of corn. But here, we are standing over 200 feet above the plains,  on one of only two places like this in the entire world” She would proceed to tell me again how only in China are there a chain of hills like this, formed during the Ice Age, when glaciers advanced down into the mid-continent of North America, grinding underlying rock into a fine powder-like sediment called "glacial flour."  She would recite again as she had every time we visited that place that as temperatures warmed, the glaciers melted and enormous amounts of water and sediment rushed down the Missouri River valley and the sediment was eventually deposited on flood plains downstream, creating huge mud flats. She would go on, talking about prevailing winds, blowing in a cycle for thousands of years, creating dunes and eventually, the hills we stand on today. She talked of the creatures that once roamed these beautiful hills, now extinct and of the first peoples who roamed these hills as evident in the artifacts found all around. Then, she would stop, and listen to the sounds…..we would listen together in the silence….only the sounds of birds singing in their treetop homes and the whispering of the wind through those beautiful rises.  We would smell the air, and take in the beauty around us.

The Loess Hills are a rare and unusual landform, but they are not permanent; loess terrain is dynamic and rapidly evolving. The Loess Hills of Iowa are extremely fragile. They have one of the highest erosion rates in the U.S.. Erosion from rainfall and flooding removes loess from the hills and redeposits it on the flood plain from which it came, and the clearing of some of the land for agriculture has accelerated this erosion.

My mom was a master naturalist, long before that idea had a name, and  had a deep appreciation and love for nature and for it’s history. She worried about the future of places like this, and if they would be here for future generations to enjoy. She once said to me that we need nature to live not just physically but spiritually. “Nature feeds our spirit,” she would say. “In nature, we can get a glimpse of the majesty and wonder of Our Creator.”

 I know she was right.  I was oh so lucky to grow up with a woman who instilled in me her love of God’s earth and to appreciate it’s beauty.

Because of her, I can recognize a bird by it’s song, and name countless wildflowers and native vegetation. I can sit in silence, alone in the hills, and feel close to The One who created it all.

When I am lonely for her voice, her touch, her smile, I know I can go to those hills, and feel her presence. I know I will find comfort there, I can feel God’s presence in places like those hills better than I can any place else on earth. I can hear His voice, and, I can hear my mother’s voice too, echoing in my mind, telling me once again the stories of the land, and I am comforted.