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.