The other night I went out the kitchen door and into the little mud room exposed to the elements by a torn screen on the door leading outside. The dog followed me as I closed the door behind us, waited while I placed my hand on the door ledge in the screen and pulled it open, and ran down the outside stairs to sniff at the wooden gate leading to our massive backyard. We both marched into the dark and the ground crunched beneath my feet. The dog ran off to sniff at every icy smell and run toward every sound, falling frozen leaves rattling against icy branches in the cold night. Above us, a million (not yet a billion) stars dotted the black sky in familiar patterns, including our good old friend Orion. And I turned my body north to the Big Mountain a few miles away and saw only a gray milky mass spreading from east to west rolling slowly south to engulf the dark and the stars in its path. A wave of unknown and unannounced weather silently bearing down. If it has even an ounce of moisture in it, there will be snow on the ground in less than an hour. Once inside, as I sat on the couch, I felt like something outside was happening that was glorious and ominous and beyond my understanding. Montana. It's big.It's been around two months here in Montana. Silent I have been on the blog circuit as I grow accustomed to life in a small town in a big state in the left-middle of North America. I live in a ski town where people have transplanted themselves from other places and loved it so much they couldn't stand to leave even when they tried. The Alps of America, where Costco, Walmart, and Best Buy couldn't build unless they agreed to place their stores far out of town and sink their massive parking lots down below the horizon so as not to obstruct the mountain and countryside view of the cars driving along Highway 93. The best part of shopping in that one stretch of highway between Kalispell and Whitefish is the exiting of each store, where you walk out to view mountains with clouds painted all around them. It's a gentle jarring feeling of city within country, and a sign of change coming to a quiet place.
Moving here was wet and filled with various kinds of cold metal, including a long car trailer and a relative shoebox of a moving truck. Seattle celebrated the week of my departure with non-stop rain. The days before the actual move saw the apartment slowly turn into a mausoleum, with Kelli and the Cats gone ahead to Montana and the Dog off to his auntie's for a week of pampering. With no one there, everything froze while I worked my mornings at the bakery. Returning home to see everything in its exact same place as I had left it, after a menagerie of activity for close to three years... my home became someone else's, and the city seemed to turn off and wait out my leaving. On the final night, after my friend Colm the Moving God had helped me and left, I sat with my newly returned basset/lab in a space on the living room floor we had never sat on before, feeling utterly alien. He must have felt far worse than me, having left his home a week before with it full of everything he knew, and returning to a post-apocalyptic void of all except his Dad. There was some tail wagging for me. As for the trip the following day, I'm sure he hopes I'll just knock him out next time I want him to ride shotgun across two mountain ranges for sixteen hours in a truck with no CD player.
Whitefish put its holiday decorations up around its streets, and the lamp post at the end of our gravel driveway is bedecked with a large blue lighted snowflake on it that never turns off, and since we live on the road north out of town and on the way to the Big Mountain (that's really what it's called, Google it), and if you decide to visit, we live at the eleventh snowflake on the right after you pass the intersection across the railroad tracks. But downtown, the twelve square blocks that constitute 90% of all commercial activity in town (and all in two-storied old, mostly wood buildings to boot) now looks like an Alpine village in non-stop holiday celebration. You expect sausages and bread and mulled wine to be sold on each corner, but you'll have to settle for one of our dozen or more restaurants and bars where everyone knows your name or at least pretends to. 
So, there it is, and here I am.
... and here's Coal,
awaiting your visit.
We have room for you in the house
and for at least three RVs on the front lawn.
The deer will keep us company till you arrive. :)
