Tiny – a dynamo at less than 100 pounds – Kay began and ended my summers for the last dozen years.
I was an-almost-there, rest-up stop on her way from Hallock, Minnesota, to West Glacier.
And her deep-breath, good-night’s-sleep stop after packing and saying goodbye at Glacier Campground and before getting serious miles under her belt toward Minnesota.
Helena was, in fact, always just a bit out of her way. But we never ran out of adventures to intersperse with nonstop conversations—always fueled by whichever home she’d most recently left.
In June, I heard much about the library and Peggy; Wilma and her children; Janice; Bob and Nancy; Mary and Quentin and her nephews; graduations; and the all too frequent funerals. I’ve forgotten names, but not the vignettes. The wild-child student who grew up to be the best nurse. The neighbor whose mental illness Kay assuaged in patient and long-winded phone calls. Zumba classes. The neighbor who discreetly used Kay’s garage during the summer and so needed a call from Helena marking her return—with enough time to remove the evidence. The same neighbor who came to her rescue—literally—and ferried her as well to appointments.
In September, I heard about Pork Chop and checking in campers, shared meals, new cooks, new “do you believe this” stories, the old-timers’ picnic, adventures with Karen and Kathleen and Monica and Rich and the Giffords. Follow-up, too, to the field trip when Kay led Karen and me to the Blackfeet Reservation and Duck Lake and expanded her endless story repertoire with people and events that happened there. The Glacier family–another entire community that Kay embraced and missed already by the time she’d driven across the Divide and down the Front—registered fresh and glorious in her mind.
In either June or September, if Kay arrived when other friends stopped by she became their favorite character too—always finding the commonalities of life and human experience and sometimes, but not always, politics!
Every room in my house has a card or several painted by Kay and now framed. My collage box is rich in tidbits that she shared from hers. I loved talking books with Kay, knowing that any I sent on with her became a part of the Hallock Public Library, accompanied by her detailed recommendations. I loved, also, learning of the people and causes Kay admired, knowing that she acted on her feelings–faithfully writing notes of thanks and appreciation to everyone from a car mechanic to a forward-thinking county official
Kay was the longest living link to the Walters, most especially for me, to Dave. She’d known him as dude ranch hand at 16. She’d known his previous three wives as well and was of firm mind about them. Her stories of Dave’s parents, George and Dorothy, were gold too—told in Kay’s trademark honest and colorful way. Kay and Keith had visited the Walter family property before there were any buildings other than the mink shed. And recognized everybody’s strengths and foibles.
As I missed her last year, and even more acutely this summer, I hear her voice with familiar phrases. Most especially “we had a giggle over that.” And I hear stories in my head as well, because truth be told, once Kay and I got going after the dishes were cleared from the table, we told each other the same tales year in and year out. I can’t speak for Kay, but that never mattered to me. First, because we forgave each other our repetitions—giving each other grace to repeat ourselves as needed. And always because familiar stories led us to new ones – ones with a twist and ones that allowed us to see each other in still more expansive and lovely ways.
Kay would not have braved those eighteen hundred mile round trips past her 80th birthday had she not fallen in love—hook, line, and sinker—with Glacier’s grandeur and history. Ever gracious about everyone’s faith, Kay shared my own perspectives on an afterlife—or the likely absence of one. But she held and deepened my own appreciation for the utter miracle of all this amazing world. ©
