8.11.2013...

8.10.2013...

Tania came to Two Dot with a tiny empty locket and the hope of finding something to fit inside it. I suggested a bone as they abound in our rural world. We went to find owl pellets in an old shed where I know a great horned owl lives. We didn’t see the owl, but the pellets were all over the hood of an old Desoto that’s been parked there for decades. Later we picked apart the pellets at the school house, analyzing owl diet like two elementary students. Tania found her bones…little femurs less than a quarter of an inch long. They rest in her locket, a tiny reminder of Two Dot.

8.6.2013… no clouds, no wind, no rain

The sun is cresting the horizon about half an hour earlier than when we arrived in May. We’ve passed through the longest day of the year and now each day shortens.  The earth is changing its location as it has done every year since its debatable beginning. The debate is one of science and faith, but regardless of its beginnings its existence and patterns are fact. I can depend on the earths place in the universe…its celestial address.

8.5.2013… no clouds, no wind, no rain, cool

John is back in the schoolhouse and will stay until we return to Seattle in two weeks. I find myself breathing faster with the counting. But… just now the bright sun is climbing into the sky and it is beautiful. Deep breaths... someday, each minute will feel like enough.

8.4.2013…

Yesterday we wandered the Montana State Fair grounds with its exhibition halls full of cookware sets, rhinestones, and amazing products to ease your life. We watched people get spur-of-the-moment tattoos and watched grease dripping down the arms of all those fair goers eating deep fried cheeseburgers and cake. The carnies had their bailing wire and duct tape ready for quick repairs and no one was daunted by an earlier accident on the Zipper. They lined up, handed over their tickets and crawled in for two minutes of terror. This all may prove what Guthrie had to say about men at the end of the Oregon Trail faced with a steak dinner rather than fish from the Columbia. “The promise of a mere change in diet lifted all the spirits. Small as it was on any scale, why shouldn’t it? Men lived by the little things, not the big.” The promise of a deep-fat fried meatball, some Indian flat bread, and the whirl of a carnival ride.

8.2.2013…

Before I opened my eyes today, lightning seeped through my eyelids waking me with light followed by full body resonating thunder. The storm started about six last night with wind from every direction. This un-August like rain is good for growing crops, but bad for hay already cut and laying in windrows. These things were not on my mind as I lay flat not ready to wake; eyes closing between lightning flashes. But my eyelids kept warming with light, bringing them open for each strike.

8.1.2013… fully overcast, no wind or rain

I just finished Guthrie’s Fair Land, Fair Land. He published this book over 30 years after Big Sky and The Way West, inserting it into the middle of his Western sequence. Perhaps he felt he’d left Dick Summers, the mountain man/Oregon trail guide, hanging after reaching the Oregon territory and turning his eyes back to the Great Plains. I was happy at the prospect of knowing what happened to Summers, even though I guessed it wouldn’t end well. Of course it didn’t. He was labeled a “turn-coat” with his squaw wife and half-breed children and that was the end of him. But worse was his experiencing the inch-by-inch loss of the land he loved to an idea of “progress.”