“I have sailed across a sea of words to ask if you will come with me.”
Tonight, in one earthly dimension, I see a twisted and gluttonous season—frightening, heartbreaking, monstrous. And in another, I live in the light of extraordinary friendships, in worlds and hearts laid bare by breathtaking books, in music that sings me out into the stars, an incomprehensibly magic universe. I wish for you the same radiances.
To my great delight and comfort this year, you have joined me:
- After apple crisp and ice cream, as we study each other’s treasures and tell each other their stories;
- As firelight dances at our feet while constellations and planes and satellites skim the night sky above;
- While we read to each other from laptops and scrawled pages;
- With the mountains sliding mauve into the night;
- Over pizza and pancakes, cocoa and wine; crepes and croissants;
- Across a dozen states and two oceans on the sorcery of electrical impulses;
- On your porch and mine.
I can’t remember a year as illuminated by books. Writing so lyrical, so precise and wise that I kept stopping to absorb the richness. The best of many:
- Daniel Klein’s Travels with Epicurus—common sense Greek philosophy applied to these “golden years.”
- Words in Pain—published in 1919; thirty-five-year-old British mother Olga Jacobs’ thoughtful anthem to her life, her approaching death, and her fiercely rational beliefs.
- Three Montana books that kept their narratives honest about what Montana is and what we are not: Joe Wilkins’ The Mountains and the Fathers: Growing Up; Ellen Notbohm’s The River by Starlight; and Susan Henderson’s The Flicker of Old Dreams.
- And from the wider world: This Tender Land, William Kent Krueger; Sarum and London, Edward Rutherford; Solitary, Albert Woodfox; The Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward; The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace Wells; Bright and Distant Shores, Dominic Smith; Nothing More Dangerous, Allen Eskins; and, once again because they are that good, all of Ellen Meloy’s books.
And in between reading, I had the great good fortune to travel to Seattle, Dupuyer, Dillon, Columbus, the North Fork of the Flathead, assorted Montana byways and West Sussex, England (well, London, too, and Brighton and Henfield and a host of tree-lined lanes). I got to read Ella to sleep, play dress up with Amanda and Matt’s whole crew, and glimpse Memo heading to his first homecoming. I’ve made new great friends and settled myself at the keyboard to write Montana Women’s History Matters Facebook posts and to resurrect episodes from my past. Besides—there are those small daily chores and the annoyances of age: cranky knees still; a dab of dizziness; hearing loss; eye glasses for every occasion.
Just a fellowship-rich weekend ago, from a front row seat, I was lucky enough again to hear Rodney Crowell, a master of music and lyrics, crafted and sung from his heart. And so with his words, I wish you a radiant year, among clouds of song.
We live our legends down, wake up in lost and found
Become that highway sound and roll on through
It’s the rise and the fall of the clocks on the wall
It’s the first and the last of your days flying past
Oh what a beautiful world.
“We will sleep in clouds of song.”
Images and text from “A Child of Books,” Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston thanks to references in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings.
