Category: Essays

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…

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…