Two Dot: favor/purge

“For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither toward justice nor away from it. It is pharmaken. It radiates. “        - Maggie Nelson, Bluets #164

After a solstice fire of blue flames, I slept soundly but woke up feeling like the blue had inhabited my body. Am I sensing the turn of the sun? Blue skies of summer giving way to the blue light of ice?  It is not the middle of summer, but it is the shift in the cycle of light... dear old sun.

Two Dot: what remains

The fire was still burning in the morning. A man, who looked to be covered in soot, walked around the site. Had he been there all night? When I’d gone to bed the fire had been the size of a small house. Tall flames burned through the night and I slept badly. What was burning... debris from the remodel next to the bar or something more secret? Eventually the soot-covered man drove his truck back down the railway line and left a few flames and a stream of smoke running low across the filed. The smoke was nearly blue, not like the blue of a hot fire, but blue like milk with all the fat removed, or the sky at the horizon where the intense blue light has already been scattered. What ever had been, was there no longer.

Two Dot: 2 voices

Every leaf is pointing east. The trees bend and the building moans, all yielding to the unseen prevailing wind. It is another day of weather. I have turned on the heaters in each room and crawled back into bed with the cat at my side. From here, I look toward a day on my own in the studio. “What are you working on?” people ask. It is a simple but difficult questions. I will leaf through some papers, watch for the sun, read something, maybe write a few lines, shuffle some objects on my work table, and look out the window. It looks like idleness.... especially compared to irrigating, plowing, feeding, or balancing books. But it is only idle to the chastising voice in my head... when I let her speak.

The windows have been closed against strong winds and cold temperatures. I barely heard the call. It came out of the twilight, the wind having calmed after two days of agitating everything in its path. I cracked the window to hear better. Was it an owl? I hear mourning doves every day with their owl like calls, but this was different. I followed the call from window to window. When it grew too faint to discern, I went to the internet to confirm what I thought. There is something slightly offensive to me about spelling out bird calls. Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo, does not remotely describe the wildness that comes from an owl’s bulging throat and syrinx. Or worse....translating calls to human language., “Who cooks for you?” or even Shakespeare’s lyrical,  “To-whit; To-who.” The great horned owl out my window was clearly untamed and uncultivated to human speech. It was the owl’s own innate animal voice that drew me to listen, stirring affinity and estrangement at once.

Two Dot: both sides

Driving back from Bozeman with the passenger seat empty, I watched the clouds. It will be eleven days before I retrace this road to pick up John on his return from Seattle. Alone, I pulled off the road at the entrance to the Lennep Memorial Cemetery where the stratocumulus clouds rolled away from my camera and over the hills. They were dark at the bottom with white swells at the top, laid out in a pattern. I’d been listening to Jason Isbell’s “Something more than free” in the car and the clouds matched the melancholy-yet-hopeful mood of the album. His ballads don’t shy away from difficulties, but they are equally not afraid to hint at promise.

With the camera put away, I turned toward the cemetery, unlocking the gate and letting myself in without thinking.  It was neatly mowed, had tall trees. and graves dating from the 1800’s to now.  There are many Volseths and Bergs on the headstones, names that I know well. Norman Volseth was buried here just a few years ago. I have listened to Norman tell stories of the area. Now it will be up to the next generation to carry those stories forward. Past and present, lost but not forgotten, melancholy and promise.

Two Dot: mistress

Montana is my mistress, the one I keep without giving up my first love. She is the one I see whenever I can. I have only recently thought this idea... wondering if I should hide the fact that I have two loves rather than flaunting them. The thought came to me when I was buying plants for my Montana place. As the nursery owner was tallying my bill, I brought out photos of my lush Seattle garden. “This is the garden I left to be here.” I tell her... quickly followed by statements of love for my Montana garden as well. It was as if I were trying to justify the sincerity of my love to the parents of my mistress.

Two Dot: into blue

Leaning back against a pillow and this sturdy maple head board, laying very still with the cat softly snoring on one side, John on the other. My eyes are closed but staring at the newly risen sun. There is no word for the color... the color of warmth. I see it as soon as my eyes are closed but it takes longer to really take it in. Today I will track that color across the open Two Dot sky until the sun drops behind the western horizon over 15 hours from when it rose.

Watching the sun come up has altered my vision. There are bright spots in my eyes, in the room, on this page. I want to close my eyes and let the reddish light seep through my eyelids. Perhaps go back to sleep in a penetrating glow. The six window squares are matched by six corresponding light squares on the opposing walls...surrounded.

Tranströmer wants to swim in the sky, “The air’s so blue.” Blue because it is the shortest wave length and is scattered before the other colors. There is only blue when the sun is near. Dear old sun.

Two Dot: there = here

There has become here again... twelve hours on the road, the cat in the back seat. Now she is curled on the bed at my feet, her face tucked into her paws. Is this how she makes the transition? I will spend the day working with John to restore the house from winter, vacuuming up dead flies and mouse droppings. Outside, the grass is nearly to our knees. It will take us a week. But just now there is the quiet to listen to.   

Two Dot: last

Seventy two mornings waking up in the schoolhouse. Each of them with a variation of light. Today the clouds are a Dutch painting, ranging gray to white in each single puff and the blue of the sky flirting in and out, all complimenting the green fields below. Perhaps, last night’s rain has cleared the air and brightened the colors to this affect. There is argument among those of cloud appreciation and even within meteorological circles as to the accuracy and truth of clouds painted by Jacob Van Ruisdael and his contemporaries. But here it is out my window in Montana. Six degree’s difference in latitude, Haarlem to Harlowton and worlds away in climate yet... I think of Dutch Landscapes when I am here, especially on a day like today. Is it the Golden Age Landscape painter’s choice to make compositions with 2/3 sky? Which matches our reality in this big sky country. This is my last morning to sit on the bed with six beautiful windows looking out. I will carry this view with me for close to 300 other days of the year. 

Two Dot: telling

Richard drove us to the mountains. There was something about going to a sheep camp, but no one had really had time to talk about it. He and Alicia and the dog fussed at each other, everyone basically asking how much further… how much further. But John and I were in the passenger seats and in no hurry. We had given over the day to this annual picnic and didn’t care how long it took to get where ever we were going. We drove 11 miles off of the Kings Hill Highway, down Divide Road passing parks that Richard knew before we reached them: O’Brien Creek, Moose Park, Lone Tree Park, and finally Harley Park.

A vast expanse of prairie grass is surrounded by pines and firs, with a marshy nearly-dry stream winding through. Richard kept looking for a picnic site with water, but of course we didn’t need water. I think maybe the search was a hold out form his sheep days when he and his father and brother ran bands of sheep along Divide Road from park to park. He conceded to a spot near an old fire circle on the edge of the park. We spread out a blanket and with chips and beverages settled around the blackened stones that held only the memory of a fire.  This had been the destination for the sheep and Richard began recounting his sheep years. He was cook for the sheep tender. They camped in different locations, the tender with his teepee out amongst the sheep and Richard with his tent and cooking outfit in amongst the trees at the edge of the park, maybe near where we were sitting. He described the sound of the sheep foraging close the trees in the evening, not in a nostalgic way so much as with love…. love for a time connected so closely to place and the sounds that make up a quiet that has nothing to do with lack of noise. Richard continued to talk. He described the ranching life that came after the sheep and working with his father. He admitted to his ranch's near collapse, and marveled at its rebuild. He misted for a moment, as Richard can do, when he remembered a time when he had no hope for the happiness he has now. At that point the stories where over, except that they are never over once you've told them. 

Two Dot: sky light

Eben Goff and his friend Gwynell were here overnight. We ate and talked into the night. Eben was interested in the building, school by nature, now studios and home. Last night he called it strange, but after sleeping and waking up to the light of this place, he recognized the lateral-ness of the building, its horizontal planes and the way the slightly elevated height of the main floor takes in light expansively, especially the sideways light of morning. That is why I am here, I told him. Stegner talked of climate and geography conditioning us. I agree, but perhaps there is a predilection for a certain type of environment that we are ready to be conditioned by. This is what I keep asking myself here.

Two Dot: flawed glory

After the family left, we sat by the fire under a growing moon, listening to Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. There is plenty of romance in Grey’s novels, the romance of men and women, of hero’s and villains, and of earth and the heavens.  But there is also romance in our lives: between John and I, and in a fire under a Montana sky.

We listened and recognized the stories that have fueled motion picture westerns and we also recognized in ourselves the lingering American desire for bravery, endurance, stoical indifference to pain and hardship, recklessness, contempt for law and a hawk-like need for freedom. It is a combination that fuels both commendable and contemptible behavior. As Stegner said, America is still a “flawed glory and an exhilarating task. 

Two Dot: night light

Deep in the night when the Perseids were at their peak, John whispered “The stars are falling.” I could not rouse myself, but I turned toward the window, perhaps hoping that the magic might penetrate my sleep if only I faced it. I did get up later and leaned on the window ledge for a minute. Two meteors streaked through the sky and I fell back into bed. In the morning we agreed that if we woke that night we would go outside. At 3am I checked the windows in every direction. The day’s cloud cover was gone as predicted and stars pierced the dense black. I watched to the north until I saw the dash of a meteor and woke John. We stumbled through the dark house out onto our front porch and lay back in lawn chairs cocooned in quilts and looked for meteors in a field of stars. They came again and again, some leaving tails, some not. It is both a reassurance and a bewilderment to look into the night sky. The multitudes of stars and the vastness of space are hard to comprehend. At the same time, family and friends spread across this country look out to the same dependable constellations, the occasional phenomena, and the milky-way holding us all.

Two Dot: between the ditches

It was a slow drive after sunset as we scanned the ditches for deer or any animal that might unexpectedly pop up in front of the car. We settled into quietly singing along with the CD’s playing on the car deck. It kept us awake and alert without the distraction of conversation. More than half way home, the turn-off to Martinsdale loomed up quickly from the dark and John turned without signaling. People don’t use their turn-indicators much here. I have signaled just just for fun when turning from one lonely gravel road to another. But last night in the deeply black high plains, driving slow and trying to stay clear of the deer and the ditches, suddenly the flashing red and blue appeared in the side mirror. I turned to John and said “I think we are being pulled over.” He glanced in the rearview mirror and guessed we were. There is no shoulder on Highway 294, so John stopped in the road and became more of a hazard than the deer or lack of signals. But we complied with the officer’s requests and questions without fear. Besides having nothing to conceal we don’t fit  stereotypes for trouble. We are white and middle-class and older. The officer was very young, but respectful, though dressed for war. The lights, the uniform, and the guns were more of a strange apparition than a threat or a comfort. 

Two Dot: picture perfect

We made our way through Bridger pass, the high range to the west backlit by a usual and yet impossible sunset. I snapped photos from the car and even stopped to get out for a better view, but the rectangles gathered by my camera were a disappointment. The mountain silhouettes still had definition to their faces, but of a completely different color pallet and value than what was going on behind them. The clouds started intensely white with burned out hot spots and mottled glowing yellow edges. The pinks came on as the cloud formations changed to layered striations and the peaks sawed up and down as we continued to drive. We stopped for a minute at a campground and when we emerged from the trees it was clear that the show was over. We drove on quietly in the collecting dark, remembering the color and light. Now I find these words are about as useless as the photos to convey the view.