... I'm comforted to have known a computer to old age. Not elderly. In laptop years, I'm thinking seven and a half is probably more like retirement. Retirement itself could be lounging on a shelf with a view or, perhaps, housing all the old games along with some early Adobe and Office software, and a place to stick a flash drive and escape to your outside office. Cell phones may have become sleek fighter jets compared to their early propeller-run models, but they all share a two year average lifespan anyway. So, how rarefied can it be that a laptop hits old age or maybe just retirement? My own magnificent titanium swiss army knife of a Powerbook caved its lil heart in, eyes still working but the ticker toasted...
Then, there was this small town I wrote about for a while and all of a sudden left. I love to romanticize my memories of places in order to give the past a frame I can return to over and over again and perhaps also in fear of memories being pruned far too quickly. So, I set to writing about Whitefish and our cabin abode there for two years:
...Weird that a small town can be hard to say goodbye to. Especially when you’re moving to a smaller one.
Another town begins to slide beneath my feet. I know it’s the old story of a town and a person bumping into one another and parting, and it repeats itself across the world each minute. This particular one’s from the eyes of a city boy who has counted vulture carrion roadside feasts among the expected sights on a 60 mile daily work commute and whose preferred office space is the wrought-iron table in the backyard shaded by a Spaten umbrella with a soundtrack of hummingbird buzzes and crow wings flapping over five dialects of bird calls. When I told my father two years ago that we were moving here, the ensuing phone conversations for weeks after usually consisted of a) worries surrounding some aspect of small town life and b) Dad asking quickly and loudly “Now where is it you are moving to again? WhiteWhat?” Whitefish. “Whitefish... whitefish...” he trailed off, and I could imagine him tapping his index finger against his oval shaped mouth, wondering, as he let out another “Whitefish... Whitefish.... Huh...Hmm!....” raising his bushy eyebrows as his brain searched the many road maps in his head and came up empty. To this day I still wonder about Montana, myself.
Montana’s residents speak of it like a friend or a family member, to you. Let’s begin at the homestead, and specifically in this afterthought of a backyard of ours, because chicken wire nailed to posts around a field of dandelioned grass seems to give more of a suggestion of defined space than any working boundary. With a small forest to the North, a glade of cottonwoods to the East, and a hedge of wild berries next to a small stand of young aspen to the South, our deer friends can attest to it being a hot spot for escaping the main road in front of us and the backroads behind, and a nice place to eat crabapples. Magpies land on thin bare birch branches and wild turkeys strut under cottonwoods. Squirrels run full speed along their arboreal interstate from branch to branch to tree to tree and stop only to scream at the top of their lungs yepyepyepyepyepyepyep. Yellow jackets search slowly and carefully for something to latch a new hive to, ignoring me completely and spending many days surveying a certain bump on the gray paint under the roof edge. Then there’s the 9-foot tall moose I saw in the backyard through the kitchen window: me holding a pair of chickens ready for roasting, staring dumbstruck at a Northern Exposure moment literally playing out before me, and her playing hopscotch with the backyard fence as she meandered through town on her way into the northern forests.
In my backyard alone, I get Montana.
There was more to write about Whitefish, like the commute among the mountains to and from work, or Glacier National Park being in our backyard, to name two of hundreds of writing-worthy experiences. But most of all, I realize now after moving from that small town to an even smaller town that I was only starting to 'get' Montana back a few months ago, that new and important layers of the term 'diversity' are unfolding before me in ways I couldn't have anticipated. And there was more writing than just those thoughts and more thoughts now to add to them, but right now I have to go take my garbage to the dump a few miles away and then shop for eight things at four different stores in two different towns. So, more to come.
