House of Death
One more time, the Pegasus Gold Inc. big shots hoped that if we saw the Little Rockies, checked out an archaeological site or two, viewed just how ragged and raped and desolate the mountains already…
Category: Essays
The Coat
I moved to Helena in June 1980. New colleagues had the summer to scare me with winter survival stories. By August, I was an easy mark for the ladies’ wear clerk at Hennessey’s who steered…
Emily
Whose mojo is drama and whose by-words have always been “what next?” Her four-year-old-self all sass—stands in the photo in my hall, blonde pig tails flying, socks yanked up to her knees, hands on her…
Amanda
Came into my life hanging onto her dad’s hand, hopping across the Thrifty Scot Motel parking lot that first uneasy visitation weekend. It was April 1982 and I was just learning Dave’s measure and that…
Walking this World
At Dave’s memorial service at St. Peter’s Methodist Church, I arranged three of pairs of his shoes beneath the altar—a nontraditional centerpiece. I didn’t include the dusty black, back-of-the-closet wedding and funeral dress pair. But…
Govan and Graduate School
“And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes…
What Blooms
“When you are ninety it’s your privilege to go to sleep in company if you choose. She was tired of answering [the reporter’s] questions anyhow. Wagon train, redksins, road-agents, fiddle-de-dum. Folks were mighty funny about…
Teddy Bear
Improbably somehow, around second grade, I acquired a fistful of paper bills, play-pretend money. I don’t know why or where. Mother and Daddy would never have purchased anything so inconsequential or commercial. I didn’t filch…
First Doll – Black Doll
Sometime before I turned four, Mother made my first doll: in the parlance of 1950, a pickaninny. She’s a foot tall with a nine-inch reach, constructed in almost Flat-Stanley dimension, her red-brown evenly loomed skin…
Seeley-Swan Accounting
Here on this sun-dappled summer highway, I tally for myself the dreams I’ve left behind. The ones outmoded by age and circumstance. The ones that were always more fantasy than prospect: A sturdy bungalow; An…