The closest Menards is a little over an hour away in Hastings, Nebraska. I'm a little freaked out by the limited season of garden departments in the area. We're used to being able to go to a nursery in Southern California every day of the year for a wide variety of plants including vegetables for winter gardening.
Here in Jewell County it's disconcerting--a little melancholy--to drive up to a mostly empty and abandoned garden center in the local stores. A couple of sickly $5 leftover plants dying from neglect all that's left to pick from.
But the Menards in Hastings is not the Menards of my childhood in Wisconsin. The new Menards is a mega super store with everything from pet supplies to K-cups of coffee, groceries, candy, clothes, lumber, ceiling tiles, wonderful Watkins hand soaps and lotions. Each department marked by neon signs. A great big, overwhelming store. Hastings and the big Menards are a fun discovery because it's fairly close and it's a pleasant drive this time of year with the green prairie, the row crops, the wildflowers. It's an easy, open two-lane highway drive.
Hastings is also fun for the Runza drive-thru featuring Runza sandwiches of ground beef and cabbage with melted cheese in a unique bun pocket. Great for picnicking with a side of frings (half fries, half onion rings, something every restaurant should offer). Close to the university in Hastings is a delightful park with fishing ponds and bridges near beautiful homes on University Street, a street which reminds me of Summit Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. My grandma called Summit Avenue the "Swell District" with its stately homes. University Street in Hastings feels like a swell district with older, immaculately maintained homes and gardens.
Exploring the area towns and neighborhoods shows the differences in the gardening season with monthly surprises. Early spring beginning with the fragrant blooms of lilac hedges. There's regret as the lilacs fade, but then bridal wreath comes in and shocks you, reminding me of great grandparents posed in grainy black and white pictures in front of old homestead porches with fountains of bridal wreath framing them. Just as you start to feel some blues that bridal wreath flowers are done peonies pop. Peonies especially prominent in cemeteries where almost every headstone has a peony beside it in colorful memoriam.
Then daylilies follow peonies, then tiger lilies, then luscious wildflowers such as phlox along the roadsides. Each of these bloom cycles fleeting. And yet something else follows. The end of something spectacular is always the beginning of something newly spectacular.
I'm entering autumn with some trepidation because this will be my first snow winter, frost winter, freezing winter in thirty-one years. Thirty-one years in a mild, Mediterranean climate. So I'm absolutely anxious about it. Wondering how I will do in snow when all the excitement over summer turns cold. But then I also think it can be a beautiful pause--a pause I'm also weirdly looking forward to.
There won't be the digging, the watering, the mowing, the weeding. It can be a time of reading and reflection. A time to study seed catalogs with anticipation. A time to remember lilacs and, in the remembering, to plan. And to imagine the next crops and bouquets.
For Further Exploration
Reporting on faith from North Central Kansas.
