8.5.2012... few clouds, no wind

We were at the Bonanza Creek Ranch last night having dinner with a book group. They'd invited the author of a murder mystery titled Ride the Jawbone. It was a privilege to be included as we are not part of the book club and these are people who easily call themselves local. Jim Moore, who wrote the book, is from the oldest family of settlers in the area. The Voldseths, who were our hosts, are also one of the oldest families. Regardless, we were made more than welcome. We may never be truly local, but I've come to understand that does not mean we will be excluded.

8.4.2012... few clouds, no wind

The sun is just fully over the horizon at 6:15. The season is changing. Annick Smith spends her essay in West of 98 writing about age… of growing old. She uses the end of a Montana summer as loose metaphor. “The change of light tells us winter is coming, but summer’s fruitful end is now.” It is the end of summer and it is fruitful, nothing to shed tears for.

8.3.2012… three quarter cloud cover, no wind

At 5:15 it was still raining. The dripping from our faulty gutters sounded like horses. Not fully awake, it took me a minute to register what it was. Horses in the road seemed more plausible than rain in this drought year. I lay back down, but didn’t sleep; listening as the rain receded and the wind picked up. Gusts blew through the open windows stirring everything in the room. As always I whispered encouragement to our ancient cottonwood. “Be strong!” At 6 it was still fairly dark with cloud cover, no crimson horizon, no frilly pinks, just a suggestion of the season coming. But it is still summer…this was only a display of Montana’s changeable weather.

8.2.2012… quarter clouds, slight wind

Audun, who is five, went with his Grandmother Alicia and I to the Martinsdale Hutterite Colony for a visit and viewing of the new house of a soon-to-be bride. Alicia encouraged Audun to play outside with the colony kids. I watched him from the window. Audun, with his chin in his fists sat on the front stoop faced with a bevy of little girls dressed and hovering like starlings. They stared and said little, just flitting around in a flock. Behind them, a few bigger boys road identical homemade scooters up and down the sidewalk. Audun sat firm until finally he skirted around the girls in a sprint and took off down the sidewalk toward the boys. Alicia asked the girls to watch out for him, but when he finally found us later his eyes were red and teary. He stomped his foot and said, “I don’t need watching, not by girls!” Was he playing out an old cultural childhood separation of boys and girls or reacting to the radical difference in gender rolls in the Hutterite community?

8.1.2012…few clouds, no wind

It was cold this morning, nearly like fall. We ate breakfast outside in the chill, but still had to start a walk by 7:45 before it got too hot. The temperature changes radically from night to day and this short window is the transition. There are other transitions I am noticing. The sun rose at 6:05, 20 minutes later than the last time I recorded it. And it is the first day of August, the last month of my summer. I never want to see it come and it always does.

7.31.2012… few clouds, no wind

I’ve been thinking further about A.B. Guthrie’s quote and a relationship to Annie Dillard’s exploration into the particular and its place in the whole. We do all leave an impact of some sort, one affecting the next and the next affecting the one after that. Our choices leave physical imprints…more now than ever. But the earth is strong. I believe it will survive. It may not be habitable to us, but it will survive. Perhaps it is only our bed we are fowling. I began this thought process with more hope. I was considering our individual ability to influence and the collective impact created. We are at once the particular and the whole.

7.30.2012… few clouds, no wind

Ed Kemmick is a writer for the Billings Gazette. He was seduced to Montana from the midwest by A.B. Guthrie’s novel Big Sky. Last week my cousin Shane Moe told me that Big Sky is his favorite western novel as well. The book describes relationships between men and land and while I suspect Guthrie was not referring to mankind in the broad sense, I think it may be true that men and women’s relationships to land are what the west is about. Guthrie wrote about the land in the words of his character Jim Deakins, …what did it care about a man or his hankerings or what happened to him? There would be other men after him and others after them, all wondering and all wishful and after a while all dead. I don't think this is about hopelessness; it is about the place we each hold in the larger picture. And it reminds us that it is the land that remains.