Category: Essays

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…

A Hunger for Ceremony

I’d been in Montana just six months.  Largely still on my mid-career honeymoon.  Albeit with a decent number of irritants:  no correcting Selectrics in the office; a staff that considered attendance optional; a boss whose…

Gifts

I’ve never understood the fuss over gold and frankincense and myrrh. I doubt that Mary and Joseph could use such gifts; except to pawn them in Bethlehem for food and lodging. Why not diapers for…

Becalmed

There were years when every December day counted as five. When I shortchanged the state by hours in order to cram in tasks, the list of which ate up whole pages in my calendar, not…

They Call the Wind Mariah

Give me wind.  Maybe not the howling gale that keeps Great Falls listing to the east. Maybe not the bully gusts that stiff-arm semis off the road.  Maybe not fire winds, the ominous, searing furnace…

Mountain Ash

I watch my neighbor Mary’s mountain ash tree like a hawk.  Or more accurately, like a magpie, a robin, a cedar waxwing, though I’m not scouting a meal.  Rather leaning into the elusive magic of…