Category: Essays

Old Maids or Authors

Christmas, 1972, my Mother gave me a copy of the Granddaughters’ Inglenook Cookbook, recipes from Brethren women collected over the previous 200 years—traditionally presented by the McPherson Church to its new brides.  I was 26,…

Disciplines

Dave ended every day at his desk in our basement on Choteau.  He’d built it to his own dimensions—too big to ever leave the house—and painted it brown.  A color Em and Amanda were quick…

The Land

In 2005, the last August of Dave’s life, we spent a precious week to ourselves at his family’s property on the North Fork of the Flathead River.  Precious because it was joyfully ordinary.   I did…

Francis Scott Key High School

In 1960, freshman civics students at McPherson High had to write a “what I want to be when I grow up” paper.  Easy.  I liked history.  I was girl.  I didn’t want to type insurance…

Lives Lost

On a day of incomparable gleaming airy early-spring loveliness, Harlowton said goodbye to Gene Leary.*  He was one of central Montana’s especially kind, thoughtful, contributing native sons: a service station owner, a community leader, a…

What Survives

I am not native.  I arrived in Montana more than forty years ago, on an early June day. I came on the strength of one shattered dream, new enthusiasms that were just beginning to cook,…

Playing the Prejudice

I was old before I realized the travesty I’d played in my brief career on stage. It was McPherson 1960 and our junior high 8th grade musical. About gypsies. No not THE Gypsy. No not…

The Traveling Kind*

I thought they were a tour group granted special privileges to board our plane first.  They wore identical scarves and chattered in bunches as they bypassed the rope corridors the rest of us would traverse.  …

Ticket to Ride*

It began, in my remembering, in four a.m. dark on muggy summer mornings that left us damp and chilled before Sonja and I ever settled into the back seat of our second-hand black coupe. Half…