Montana Meandering

On the road again, after 3 deliciously sedentary months hanging out on Edgewood Drive. These past few days, Gale and I (and the dogonmylap) have been here in Bigfork, Montana. During recent weeks, a happy triad of events conspired to pull us east across smoky central Washington and the upper reaches of Idaho's panhandle, to pause a peaceful while here on the northeast shoulder of enormous Flathead Lake.

The germ of the trip was a mid-summer chat with our long-time friends Bob & Suzanne about where we might roadtrip together. Next, we received a wedding invitation from one of Gale's dear cousins. Her first-born was to be married on the banks of the Swan River, just outside the town of Bigfork, on September 29. From there, the plot continued to thicken.

One afternoon in early July, I grabbed the phone and called one of my cousins. Howard and I had been out of touch for years, and I wasn't even sure the old number I had would still work. He picked up. It was his 75th birthday, I quickly learned. Almost as quickly, I managed to pass off my aberrant, out-of-the-blue phonecall as--of course--a Happy Birthday bugle. And thereby hangs the third inspiration for our Montana journey. We're heading through Missoula and Butte on Thursday for a rendezvous with him. He's lived his entire life in Southwest Montana, in the same Rocky Mountain foothills where my Mom herded cattle and tended the turkey flock on her grandmother's ranch, while his mother baked the bread and cooked 3-squares-a-day for the outdoor hands. We share some of the same roots, but his run particularly deep in this fertile ground.

As I type, Suzanne, Bob and Gale are off in the touristy section of town, browsing galleries, checking the reduced prices on properties displayed in real estate office windows, and sniffing-out anything chocolate. I and the dogonmylap stayed "home" (in the lovely condo Gale found for us on-line last month), to stare at the open laptop staring back at us. Re-kindling this blog has been feeling like a chore up until now. . . one I didn't want to tackle in the flurry of getting from one spot on the map to the next and soaking-up the warmth of this "unusually dry" Montana autumn. It feels good to be back. Back in territory that runs deep in my history. . . and back here on this page.