It took me by surprise. Resting on the steep backside of a ridge whose top was ringed with a black rock outcropping that gave it the feel of a fortress, the white bone snapped into view just before my foot landed on it. Whoa! I managed to redirect my footfall. Not only to avoid hurting the bone, but also to keep it from rolling under my foot and sending me on a tumble down the hillside. I’ve seen plenty of bones in my life. In a life lived amongst livestock, you get familiar with death and bones. You also…
Category: Earth
Spiral Horizon
The sky lightens. Delicate coral pink at the horizon fades to a delicate shell blue, if there is such a shade, and flows up the arc of the sky to become cobalt. The horizon is not a flat line any more, with its southern horizon punctuated by the irregular rounded buttes of the Bear Paw Mountains of north central Montana. Now the horizon is humped with bristly hills, all around. Cows still bawl in the distance, though. I think this sound was born with me, embedded in my bones. And one of my horses munches contentedly within easy sight of…
Woolly Bear Caterpillars & Grandpa
“You can tell how hard the winter will be by how long each black part is,” Grandpa informed my sister and I. We were small. One of my earliest memories is this. All three of us squatted in Grandpa’s garden and looked at the furry black and rusty red caterpillar. Each end of the caterpillar was black and its middle was rusty red. It marched along on its invisible caterpillar legs and feet through the marigolds, gone to seed in early September. Now, as I write this, I imagine the three of us from above. We are in a semi-circle…
Leaf Courage
I saw it there a couple weeks ago, resting among green leaves and flowers. A single yellow heart, its tether disconnected from its source. The edges of the heart were ruffled and it was a bit battered with flecks of brown on its surface. Even though a bright red flower pulsed next to the heart, and farther away a white flower blazed and deep purple flowers shone, the yellow heart’s thrum stopped my footsteps. Then it seemed the yellow heart lifted the slightest bit and hovered there over the leaves it had rested on. It whispered, “See me. Feel me.”…
Fence Lines
It’s the end of May and the beginning of a hot day. I trudge up the hill, next to a four wire barbed wire fence. The hawthorne and chokecherry bushes are blooming by the masses. Their creamy white blossoms create a misty haze where the bushes grow on the hillsides and along the creek bottoms. The blossom-scent waffles on the air; a faint, sweet wash into my lungs. I can almost wrap myself in its creamy lace-shawl warmth. Today I am checking the south fence of the horse pasture. After a long, cold winter with snowbanks that buried fences in…
Alive
In a thicket of thorn apple trees, a single tree-twig of a chokecherry tree unfurled its leaves. The first leaves I have seen this spring! They are green and rimmed with red. This little twig-tree, as tall as a medium sized cat, stands proud, there in its little clearing. After the long winter we’ve had in north central Montana, this little twig-tree is a sight for sore eyes, indeed. Winter has ended (I hope), and spring begun all in one day, it seems. Snow banks still hang out in the low places where snow piled up deep. The land looks…