| My Wishes for You Nights too starry for fear, Noons like a golden chime, The confident gift of a year, To open one day at a time, A tree from the garden of dreams Whose tapers are hopes come true Whose glitter is all that it seems These are my wishes for you. |
We were fortunate beyond measure this year to spend ten gloriously quiet days in the North Fork. It wasn’t smoky. It was unbearably hot only some days. We read and whacked weeds and ate well and tackled 20-year-old cobwebs and listened to Canadian radio and clucked our tongues over late-season floaters who should have known better. We sat bolt upright in fear one night for two hours—in the very eye of a stationary lightning and thunder storm. But most evenings, we fell asleep under skies so starry and luminous that we knew only peace.
So, for you, this season and this coming year, we second the wishes that Grace sent her friends 70 years ago.
This year was one of milestones for our family:
- In late April, at home in Eugene, Oregon, with Sergio at hand, Emily gave birth to Guillermo Poctli Balsam Romero Walter. “Memo” came into the world at almost ten pounds and has continued to grow up in good health and exuberance.
- In early May, Amanda walked graduation from the University of Great Falls, having finished all her college work the previous December.
- In mid-August, Sergio completed his doctoral program at the University of Oregon.
- And moments later, Sergio, Emily, Memo, and two dogs came to live in Missoula, Montana, for Sergio’s tenure-track teaching position in the University of Montana’s Sociology Department.
- In late August, Amanda began her first teaching job in Great Falls with a class of 19 poking, prodding, wiggly first-graders. By now, she has successfully weathered an open house, parent-teacher conferences, and the kind of daily dramas that come with six-year-olds whose social and personal hygiene skills are still rudimentary.
- By Thanksgiving, Memo was able to crawl, pull himself up, and “do the mash potato” at the dinner table. His parents have become world class Kindermusik entertainers.
- And in one of those marvelous rites of passage, one fall evening, when Em and Amanda came into the house, we saw unquestionably reflected in their eyes a budding perception that we might well be slightly daft, perhaps in need of their guidance, and likely at any moment, to leave the burners on.
Dave’s very best moment this year may well have been Friday evening, July 16, when he placed his just-published history of Civilian Public Service Camp #55 into the hands of its remaining veterans. Twenty-five men who had maintained Glacier National Park as one of the nation’s World War II alternative-service options for conscientious objectors gathered for their final reunion. With their families, they welcomed us as they had done three times before. But on this occasion, Dave had the honor of giving back to them a little of the history they had created and helped him record. Our lives have been changed with each such meeting in the face of the commitment to service and peace that these families continue to live.
Marcella is still happily recovering from the last full week of June—the Montana Heritage Project’s Summer Institute for teachers. This year, she had the opportunity to organize the Institute in White Sulphur Springs and Harlowton—tiny county seats in Grace Stone Coates’ country. We were privileged to learn and take heart from ranch and Hutterite hospitality, great sweeps of land dotted with prehistoric sites, and the human pathos that can be found in 100-year-old ledgers in diminutive courthouse vaults.
Daily life here and in the North Fork remains sweet and lovely, interesting and entertaining. Dave’s Montana Committee for the Humanities’ speeches took him to funky meeting rooms in Sidney and Glendive and Terry and Baker and Broadus—the far reaches of eastern Montana. A work speech gave Marcella all the encouragement she needed to spend a weekend with friends in Seattle and ride Amtrak back to Montana. We neighbored with a pair of fox this summer, who had taken up residence under a North Fork cabin porch. The two watched indulgently as we mowed and weeded right at their doorstep. We enjoyed half-a-dozen rookie league baseball games. We loved seeing our corner of Montana through the eyes of two good sets of friends who had never visited before—while treasuring the luxury of time with them. We lost Marcella’s Aunt Esther (her dad’s last remaining sibling) and Marcella Dresher, the Kansas teacher and farm woman for whom she was named. And the world lost hope and innocence and far too many people needlessly.
We are, though, still thankful for the gift not just of a year, but of each day—and for your presence in those days.
*Grace Stone Coates was born in Kansas in the late 1880s and moved to Montana about 1910 to teach in our state’s most urban center, Butte. But she met and married store owner Henderson Coates who soon took her back to his miniscule, central Montana, Milwaukee Railroad town of Martinsdale. Grace taught school, tutored, served as County Superintendent of Schools, contributed the Martinsdale column to the county newspaper, walked the hills around town, and wrote short stories and thousands of letters to friends, authors, editors, and educators. Many of those letters—and the treasures in them such as the enclosed poem—were published this year for the first time in Grace Stone Coates, A Life in Letters, by Lee Rostad. Lee is currently chair of the Montana Historical Society Board of Trustees. A historian, author, and rancher herself, Lee knew both Grace and the ambivalence that Grace felt about her land-locked and creativity-locked life. Lee could document that–for Grace–writing letters was “her soul’s delight” and her salvation.
