here = there is the chronicle of a placed longed for becoming a place inhabited. Following are selections from the last two years of documenting daily experience on dated postcards. The date images were captured each morning in Two Dot and registered by hand in ink and coffee as the sunlight traversed through a stencil. It is a marriage of precision and in-precision, control and control given away. The postcards were mailed to anyone who asked for them and to some who didn’t.
Two Dot: leaving
Today sun in the morning, as if to say “Don’t go.” But we persevere with our to-do lists, the tasks before we pack and leave.
The sun emerges around the house / stands in the middle of the road / and breathes on us with its red blast. / Innsbruck must I leave you.
But tomorrow there will be a glowing sun /in the half-dead grey forest \ where we have to work and live.
-Tomas Transtromer
“Landscape with Suns” from The Sad Gondolas 1996
Two Dot: migration
A hundred starlings flying around the house disturbed my dreams, pulling me up from sleep's depth with their swirling. It is impossible not to think of Hitchcock’s birds. It is impossible not to want to get out of here.
Starlings have claimed the mornings but in the evening a reasonable flock of yellow warblers and a few red-winged black birds perched in the choke-cherries across the road. Occasionally some collective signal lifts them from the branches and then they settle back down again... maybe spreading to the nearby fence wires... never swarming or threatening.
Wild swings govern my days. The desire to go home suddenly swirls around me, overwhelming... a flock of starlings lifting from the ground at once in a clatter of wing flapping without indication of their unison direction. Both cause me to duck, hoping to avoid collision.
Other times of day are not governed by sudden movements; the rhythm of work setting a tone. It is not complete stillness but movement back and forth with small rises of energy. In these times I am saturated with the desire to continue, as content as the warblers on the fence. But I am imagining that even the warblers must be feeling the urge to re-locate given the hint of winter in the morning chill.
Two Dot: twilight
This summer’s twilight is made of smoke. We turn the lights on in the morning to alleviate the dim. Last night was restless and full of coughing. and now the view out the windows is hazed like an ancient oil painting. One window, if I tilt my head just right, holds a classic landscape with a proscenium made of a ripening hay field, trees as curtains on either side. Layers of hills grow progressively soft as they recede. “All the world’s a stage.” There is meaning in the setting as opposed to the action.
Two Dot: sleeper
John and I will be in the schoolhouse a little longer, but the summer has begun to transition to memories. Guests have moved in and out of the guest bed. At first, Angie who slept downstairs with Jessica but couldn’t keep her eyes from the bed upstairs, not having Jessica’s pension for dark places. Erin removed everything extraneous from the bed. “I am a one pillow girl,” but arranged pillows and a blanket on the floor for meditation. Sara Ann stayed in the schoolhouse alone and in the cavern of the empty rooms, she stripped the bed of all but the sheet and wrapped herself in her own familiar sleeping bag. Alaina made the bed everyday precisely as she found it, but hung her dresses around the room wearing something new everyday. Yvonne was here only one night, but she did not sleep till morning, having a headache that would not give way in the dark. She slept with intense dreams that we discussed later over coffee. Jim made the bed his home for four days, sleeping through the affects of vertigo. Sleep was his only refuge until the world stopped spinning. Lynnette checked on him regularly and joined him at night.... always worried until he was able to stand and we all went to Crystal Lake. Little Ben was the last to sleep in our guest bed. He made the room his own, stacking his clothes, pulling over a little school desk for “work,” arranging all the toys from the house around the bed. His favorite stuffed dog that came in his back pack settled onto the pillows. The first night during a thunder storm, his dad found him sitting upright and crawled in beside him to alleviate the noise and light. To my delight, each morning when he crawled out of the guest bed, he came to me for a hug. All of these stories have become part of the schoolhouse.
Two Dot: still silent
Silence is a jealous lover. You court her and get to know her secrets. You find pleasure in her company and she stays with you. But if you ignore her... say in the throws of a house full of people with dinners every night and lingering coffee breakfasts... she is hard to live with again.
Sitting at my table drawing alone, the ache of every departure having lessened, I finally noticed the silence again. The silence that is never silent. Two fresh fir cones, collected on a walk with our son and grandson, began to pop in the warm studio. And there it was, the silence that is full of what is on the table and in the air.
We went to the mountains for the Perseids. We went to the mountains to get away. We went to the mountains to be still. Sitting in chairs we’d carried into the middle of the park, we watched the sun go down and the surrounding trees turn to shadows. We had nothing better to do than sit still and wait. Eventually the stars began to appear, first one and then another until the sky was littered with points of light. Early in the night for a meteor shower, the stars remained still. It was an owl who broke the stillness, repeatedly swooping closer and closer. Owls are famed for sitting still and watching from a perch, but it was us who sat still this night. In the end, it was poor night for the Perseids, We saw only a few meteors before the moon washed the view with too much light, but there was no disappointment.
Two Dot: full house
There is no poetry or cleverness in saying that my heart is full and brimming to my eyes with love for my boy and his son who are here in Two Dot. Just now, in the early morning, they are working out in our schoolyard. Bryan, who is strong and disciplined, hoists himself on the swing set bar and Ben, who is young and eager to imitate his dad, tries to do the same. I can’t stop crying both with love for the two of them and with longing for my own parents... to be in the thick of so much love. But when you are in the thick of it, you never really know what you have. It is the prerogative of the old to see that. I think there is no one left on earth that I could tell this story to and expect complete understanding. Only my mother would cry with my happiness, with my fullness.
Four days with Ben, 7 years old... a magic year. Is it too soon to write down the details? Will it inspire another plate of tears.
Some of the best experiences leave you crying, leave you aching in your middle chest. The transition from experience to memory can be painful. Both can be full of joy, but the space in-between is colored by a hazy sky, an empty bed, and indeterminacy while one thing tries to become another.
Two Dot: horizon
A summer of smoke and headaches. Fires are burning in places I can’t see. Fires in every direction. Smoke roles in on the wind and keeps slipping in, even when the air is still. John smells it when he first opens the door in the morning. I feel it in my head, just left of center above my eyes. The near pain persists, sometimes unfolding into pain and becoming all-consuming, and sometimes disappearing for a while, but never completely gone. I didn’t know if smoke is the cause, but they coincide, marching side by side. When I put these thoughts down, ink on paper, I have to.... cannot not.... acknowledge that my house, my ranch, my job has not burned. For me it is only a hazy horizon.
Two Dot: missing
I cried as the wheels from your car left dust in my driveway. You waved and I waved until you disappeared. I cried for a visit too short. I cried for wanting the rhythm of many days together and for the “unexpected” that often accompanies that rhythm. I cried for my good fortune at having a friend like you, a friend to exchange bossiness with and then laugh confessions of bossiness, a friend who tells me what I need to know, a friend who sees deep into the pool and describes it in colors that are more real for those words. I cried for being in between so many memories and more memories to come with you. I cried because of the nature of time and our increased awareness of its fleeting nature. I cried In that last moment because just then, I didn’t know why I was here and not going home with you. And finally, I cried because it is good to miss a good friend... to long for more time together. And I cried because I knew that before the day was over, I would remember – with the pervasiveness of the soft breeze on my skin right now – why I am here, knowing I will be here again and again longing for you my friend.
Two Dot: starlings
The starlings came in today by hundreds... or at least it seemed like hundreds. I think of them as immigrants. I think of them as notbelonging here. I think thoughts about them that I would never think about other people or myself. The starlings are loud and busy. They fill the air. I wonder if the other birds, the native birds, will leave?
I saw an Edward Curtis exhibition at the Bair Museum. There are 40 prints of his Indian work. Curtis spent a lifetime losing family and money while trying to capture what was Native to this place, just at the moment when Native customs/traditions/lifestyle were vanishing. I am reminded that we are the starlings.
Two Dot: yellow
I’ve never been to Naples. I don’t know what the light is like there, but I have always associated the color Naples yellow with what I have thought that light would be like. Here in Montana fields and hills are beginning to change color. The range of greens, yellows and even reds is wide. When I looked out at the field across the road this morning I thought “Naples yellow,” probably because it is a color both organic and made of light. The field’s yellow leans toward green, but I know Naples yellow sometimes does that. Maybe that is why I have associated it with light... its ability to lean green or red.
A bit of internet research this morning pointed out that I am not a painter and know little of paint. The reference to Naples in Naples yellow apparently has to do with where the pigment is mined as opposed to any reference to the quality of light in Southern Italy. And the red/green range has to do with how the pigment is prepared and what it is mixed with. But knowing little of paint doesn’t prevent me from seeing the field out my window gather light in a way that makes it appear backlit...luminous and yet, still of the earth.
The field started out yellow like butter today. It was not so luminous as yesterday, but a very saturated color. It seems the smoke haze that rolled in from the Parks Fire in Lincoln has altered my perception of the color. I know it is a small thing to have the color of the field outside my window altered. So many of the things that affect my days are small: two hares dead on the Two Dot/ Melville road, a hazy view out my window, birds eating the golden currents before I pick them... everything relative.
Two Dot: salt and sweet
Cutting a slice of watermelon, the steel blade slipped through red and released cool sweetness summoning a complete encapsulated moment of childhood summer. It burst open with shorts and a tee-shirt, with salt water and blue sky, with an untroubled tangle of uncombed hair. And then it was over, leaving me with a plate of sliced watermelon.
Two Dot: reads
I ran into a young man I know at the bar. We talked the usual pleasantries: time of year, weather, ranching. He complained of summer after the 4th of July. “So dry and hot,” but admitted to spending July in an air-conditioned swather. He told me he’d decided to listen to Jane Austin’s novels while haying last year... classics he’d missed. It began as a curious exercise, but he found himself staying after work to keep listening. We talked books for a while. He is a fan of Ivan Doig, but hasn’t read A.B.Guthrie or Zane Grey. He surprised me with his one complaint of Doig. “He portrays his Montana characters as literary, quoting classics in any situations. It’s not that way,” he said. This young man is certainly more Montana than I will ever be and knows so many more Montanans than I ever will know, but I have seen a copy of The Odyssey on the bench seat of a ranch truck. I have heard a rancher’s wife quoting poetry. And I now have a vision of this young man sitting in a parked swather listening to the last bit of a chapter of one of Austin’s piercing and humorous looks at English country life.
Two Dot: Bonnie
In rural Montana everyone is invited. The newspaper publishes what is going on: weddings, anniversaries, funerals, graduations, reunions. All are welcome. We never met Bonnie Moore Willis, but we went to her memorial because she was the sister of Jim Moore, who we did know. And she was part of the fabric of Two Dot. We joined her relatives and friends and other community members on a sandstone ridge on her family’s ranch and later gathered at the bar for a meal. There were maybe 75 people there, the number matching the ranching population of Two Dot if not matching them person for person. We talked with people we know and some we didn’t know. Bonnie’s family said she would not have come to her own memorial... too many people. Perhaps this is why I never met her. I had never even heard stories of this private Montana horse woman who was by parts tough, cantankerous, accomplished, brave, and competitive... a real adventurer. I would have been terrified and thrilled to meet her.
