The world is full of incompatibles...



 This tree blooming white with all it has. 

This tree inches deep in moss.











 My dear friend Kim walking with my daughter along rain coated pavers. 












There are these things, all true and excellent in the deepest sense.

Then there is the other side, represented recently by pressure cookers packed with nails and ball-bearings and intent to harm, a shoot-out down Cambridge's Memorial Ave., a campus policeman shot dead.

On Monday, when my mother called to tell me about the marathon bombings in Boston, I turned on my radio, set as always to my public radio station.  It's pledge week here, so reports on the bombing were interspersed with MTPRs regular cast of voices asking for support and reading from the list of premiums you could receive with your donation: rafting trips, llama manure, a full year of home-baked pies.  There's a big-tent, community feel to Montana's public radio drives which I typically love.  But on Monday, this reality felt strangely skewed from the reality of the news cast - jarring like two discordant things playing at once.

I'm never really sure what to do with the sadness generated in the course of this precious, careening life.  It is part of the business of living, I suppose.  There's no doubt our ancestors were just as confounded by loss and grief and injustice and violence as we are.  It is all through our history and holy writ, this human story. 

Yesterday, down by the creek, I picked six blades of grass and dropped them into the current singly, whispering a name of each of the four Boston victims (those deceased, though hundreds terrorized) and the names of the two perpetrators as I released each blade in the water.  I watched them spin on the current and head downstream, tiny slivers balancing on the water.  I watched until they were out of sight, the bright dazzle of the creek rendering them harder and harder to see.  For me this little ritual is a way to commit sadness and confusion to where they belong, that nameless place that makes room for them and resists explaining them away, yet nevertheless, casts them amid the shimmer and liquid logic of the rest of life.

And that's life with its incompatibles: those achingly beautiful momentary blossoms, the sadness and fear and rage storming through the Hub, the llama manure and rafting trips and home-baked pies, and the creek pouring on and on and on.  

Hey friends, it is Tuesday blog night.  So here we are.  Welcome.  Thanks for joining me.

Just yesterday, my friend was sitting in the field that is across the street from my house.  Though it was already early evening, it was sunny still.  I had just stepped out to call my kids in for dinner when Ally waved me over to her spot among the tall, tawny grasses of the field.  I knew what she was doing, sitting there, book in hand, eyes roving up the hillside.  She was keeping an eye on our kids playing at their home away from home, the neighborhood fort. 

Ally and I both moved to our street this past year, but we've been friends since our oldest children were toddlers.  She did a semester in Kenya during college, on a semester program my Uncle Paul directed.  "You know what we have here?" she said, squinting up at our kids, small figures just visible among the aspens on the hillside.

"What?" I asked, watching as my son came out of the aspen stand holding a stick like a bow and launching imaginary arrows into the field.

"A boma." 

 It's true.  We've happily found ourselves in a boma.  Boma is a term used throughout East Africa for an enclosure with dwellings (and often livestock) inside it, a few family groups living together.  Our street, Fox Field, has fields on both sides and is only one block, running directly into the foothills of Mount Jumbo.  There's open space all around our little collection of houses and, as there's only one street, running quickly to its cul-de-sac end,there's lots of too-ing and fro-ing among the families and kids. 

Spring not only brings out the birds here - thank goodness the meadowlark and its song have returned! - but it brings out the balls, scooters, bikes, wagons, and children moving from field to neighborhood tree to driveway basketball hoop to field. 

While Ally was keeping a distant eye on the contingent of our kids up the hill at the fort.  A sixth grade girl from two houses down was pushing Birtie on her trike.  Ten minutes before I came out to gather my children in, a fourth grader who lives next door appeared at my elbow.  I was prepping dinner, buffalo burgers.  "Can I do that?" she asked as I got an avocado from the fridge.  I handed it over with a cutting board and knife.  She sliced it into neat sickles and then began to tend the onions I had carmelizing in a pan.

Boma life isn't what we planned on when we moved up the Rattlesnake to Fox Field.  We were looking for a house with a little more space for our growing family and for a place within walking distance of the trails and creek.  We got all that.  And we got our boma. 
 
In the field, Ally and I watched our kids.  Seth's imaginary quiver had run out of arrows, he ducked back under the shadow of the fort.   We could hear the kids whooping over who knows what.  "Boys.  Dinner!" I called, mindful that a ten year old was manning my stove. 

"I'll send them in."  Ally volunteered.

I scooted back inside, scooping up Birtie and thanking the twelve year old who was now entertaining her with a ball.   

Boma-life, I thought with a smile, so glad we ended up here. 

 

"What is this?"  I found myself asking my husband the other day, waving at him a chartreuse plant, shaped like a fractal. From time to time we buy our produce from a co-op which deals exclusively in retailing boxes of mixed fruits and veggies.  Though the produce is yummy and far cheaper than the grocery store, there's no choice involved.  You buy your box and get what's in it - green chartreuse fractal and all.  I took a picture of this oddity and sent it to a friend who is a farmer.  "What is this?" I texted her.  This too drew a blank.  A day later I collared a woman stocking produce in our grocery store.  I pointed to a small bundle tucked between endives and bouquets of fresh rosemary and thyme.  "What is this?" I asked for a third time.  "Romanesco" she replied, "just cook it like cauliflower." Romanesco.  At this time of year, I'm always scanning my book shelves for some sun-drenched read, "A Year in Provence" or "Under the Tuscan Sun" anything with a plot that revolves around en plein air eating, walking tours of countrysides, remodels of old rambly Mediterranean houses, olives, and more en plein air eating.  I had not yet started that annual book hunt, so it was lovely this year to have been handed a tasty green emissary from such idyls.  

Though not quite officially spring here, a slight upturn in the temperature has been all the inducement we've needed to get out.  We've been hiking some and the boys have been busy at work constructing a fort in a copse of aspen saplings.  My parents and Grandma were here last week, and the boys and their grandpa did quite a bit of construction, thatching the roof with grass and securing up some of the sides with reinforcements of deadfall.  From a distance we could see the three of them at work, their blue and orange jackets sharp against the winter-browned land. 

There's something so spectacular about the palette at this time of year.  I love the look of a land about to change...

Last year I received an orchid as a housewarming gift.  I loved its sculptural white petals, its crazy interior blush of pinks, its odd thrusting roots that reached like tentacles out of the pot.  The flowers lasted for a long time, weeks of unchanging perfect white blooms.  When at last the petals were spent, I sadly clipped them back and then gave little thought to the plant, setting it out of way on my kitchen counter. 

I'm terrible with house plants really.  I have a scraggly palm that has been uprooted in turn by each of my three children during their toddler-doms and has been watered so few times in the decade  I've had it that its pot must register as one of the world's driest micro-climates.  I appreciate this palm for its tenacity and its willingness to continue with life even after a toddler has uprooted it and paraded around the house with it clenched between grubby fingers.  All other house plants I have managed to kill, or give away to more green-thumbed friends as they were respiring their last. 

So it was a pleasant surprise when the orchid that had been unobtrusively holding its own on the kitchen counter, sent up two light green buds.  I watched it, trying to give it a little love but not wanting to overwhelm it with sudden attention and over the course of weeks it turned those buds into the same glorious petals and nearly everlasting whiteness that it shared with us last year.  I know all about how nature does its thing from seed to seed without our midwifery, and I know that in the strictest sense, this manifestation of the drive to reproduce isn't miraculous, it is just the way things are... but all the same, I like being present at this non-miracle unfolding on my counter, casting its halo light in little discs, embrightening my day.       

Here's another little creature that brightens my day:

Montana's official nickname is The Treasure State, named once upon a statehood  for its abundant mineral resources.  These days however, the treasure I am finding most precious is February sunshine.  While you can't turn it into spoons or rings or copper piping, its value is inestimable.  The west side of the Divide can be a little short on this decided non-commodity and Missoula is nearly notorious for its cloudy inversion - the valley filling up with a low-lying and long-lingering cloud layer.  But when the sun does come out - oh glorious!  Yesterday was one of those days.  My three kiddos and I bundled up, but not enough, (optimism out-weighing experience) and met some friends at Maclay Flat.  Thaw was all about us -- and inside us, I think.  We strolled along the path, now packed snow, now melty mud, while the boys galloped off like animals let out of a cage.  They were on one side of us scrambling through the brush at the bottom of a cottonwood stand, they were on the other side of us slinging pine cones dropped by an obliging ponderosa, they were cutting switches from willows, they were skipping rocks in the river. They were being Children-Out-of-Doors with muddy, cold fingers and red noses. 

In addition to the sunshine, here's what the Treasure State yielded up to us: two red tail hawks wheeling high; one great blue heron silently startling at our approach, pumping those long wings on its way down river; the blaring calls of Canada geese flapping low along the river, their reflections racing with them; scores of stones skipped (or not); a haunting pile of downy feathers where some bird met a hunting raptor; one butte rising above an elbow of the river; and the russet-color of the willow breaks.  A good haul, I'd say, for us miners of such a lode.