Mother’s Nature.

Two people died on our ski mountain last week in tree wells. One was 16, the other was 29. If you’re not familiar with the definition of a tree well, here’s a visual:

The long and short of it is this: evergreens, especially those with low hanging branches, can prohibit snow from filling in and consolidating at the base of the tree. Skiers and snowboarders can catch an edge, not seeing the hole, and catapult head first into these wells, being swallowed in the snow and then buried by snow from the overhead branches. There is little hope for survival, even if you have been responsible enough to partner up and watch as each of you takes the run. It’s a fast and furious death; like drowning.

Your best hope is to ski without your pole straps so that you can potentially have free hands to dig breathing space around your mouth and nose. And then you’re supposed to gently rock, creating more space. And you’re not supposed to panic or struggle, a lot like being caught in a rip tide. Except you’re stuck. Nothing is flowing but hope that your partner is not down at the lift line wondering where you are and remembering, oh yeah, he/she was supposed to be watching you, and oh yeah, skiing and snowboarding, as fun as they are, are sports that can kill.

I wonder about this, after seventeen years of living in a ski town. I wonder about this as a mother of two kids who live to ski and their friends do too. I wonder about this as someone who loves adventure and risk-taking and the abandon found in that adrenaline high. And I also I wonder about this in the field of fear and then in the field of education and then ultimately in the loveliest field I know: surrender.

This morning at the breakfast table, I asked my children how they felt about these recent deaths which have shaken our community in not just grief, but the fresh Bandaid-ripped sting of “this could happen to you.” For these are the sorts of tragedies which happen in my children’s back yard. Not that they should get used to them—as if it would even be possible. But they need to both know how to process them and to know how to prevent them.

Most everybody skis trees here.

It’s part of the our local vernacular. That kind of heart throbbing, lung burning, stomach-butterflied rush is what keeps many of us living here, whether we’re sliding down the mountain, or hiking up a ridge, or galloping through a field on a horse. We are “getting after it,” as the local saying goes. But as a mother, I needed to check in, even if it made me unpopular. They don’t need to know about city streets for now as much as the power of snow. The snow they’ve known best makes snowmen and snow cones and sledding hills.

So this morning I asked my children what the “it” was in “getting after it.” They both said, “What you love.” I could see the snowflakes dancing in their eyes. Every winter morning they run to the computer to check the ski report. Oh for the love of fresh powder. You’d think they’d been given free lifetime passes to Disneyland on those days.

My question begat a sudden discussion about how much “vertical” each of them had gotten this winter, bemoaning the insult that it was raining in mid-January on a Saturday.

Sticking to my mother guns, I gingerly asked them if they were upset about the recent tree well deaths. They both nodded. “Everyone’s talking about it at school.” Then I asked them if they understood just what happens in a tree well and how to avoid it and what to do if they were ever, God forbid, in that brutal situation.

I assumed they knew it by rote; that with all the ski lessons they’ve had and all the lectures my husband and I have given them, they’d recite it like they did the National Anthem. But it turned out: they kind of knew. But they didn’t really know. They had been seeing snowflakes during the “scary” conversations and warnings, turns out. I was horrified.

My kids ski in the trees every weekend from Thanksgiving to Easter. And here is the crux of what every mother knows well– that daring walk on the tightrope between scaring your children out of their gourd, and empowering them with knowledge. And what every child knows better: the line between being cocky pre-teen/teens, and notably shaken. Upside down suffocation? That hadn’t landed on their snowflaky radar.

I felt a rant coming. I tried to take pause. To no avail. I began with: “There’s an expression: All the avalanche experts are dead.” I paused for them to chew on it. Suddenly they weren’t so keen on chewing on their eggs and toast.

I wanted to full-on lecture them then, out of motherly fear. How was it possible that they hadn’t learned all about the full array of dangers on our ski mountain…maybe I had left something out in the long list of things to teach my children…had I remembered Hospital Corners, and not tree wells??? But I tried not to get dramatic—tried to keep it direct.

In so many words I explained that when you make decisions in the back country based on ego, you get into trouble. And then I wanted to twist the knife a bit in their hearts. Because maybe it’s the hurt that makes the mind listen and remember and maybe two deaths are not enough in the minds of children.

“Being in nature is a privilege and one that should never be taken lightly.” I explained that sometimes we forget that privilege when a machine like a chair lift zooms us up to a place that normally would take all day to ascend, and that for people who hike up the mountain rather than take the lift…for just that one…run…down, there is the grace of gratitude. We need to remember gratitude.

They looked unimpressed. Hiking up? All that work and only one run?

So I started twisting that knife harder and I knew not to but I couldn’t stop. Call it fear. Call it shock value. This was my motherhood talking now. “You need to respect the mountain. It’s not a ride at Six Flags. People who hike up the mountain for that one glide down…they know all about gratitude, but they also know about respect. They leave their egos down in the parking lot, along with their credit cards and the heat button. Their power is in paying attention, and knowing the real power, and that’s Mother Nature. They are as vulnerable as can be, save for their fiberglass skies and their Gortex. And that’s the way they want it. They have checked the avalanche report, the snow conditions. They have their partners and their plan.”

Now my kids looked like they wanted to cry. But I couldn‘t stop. Maybe you know this feeling. It’s called Running Scared.

“But when technology makes it so that you can cram in 15 of those runs in a day, tuning out the ascent with your iPod-bedecked helmet, telling jokes about the skiers below…then I just wonder about that descent and where the ego is.”

I had them with iPod.

“I’m not saying that it’s ego that had those people end up in tree wells. It happens to back country skiers too. I just wonder about intention and humility and lessons learned in a second flat, and then lost to suffocation.”

And then I lost them. Too many big words. It was probably better that way. They went back to breakfast. “So what time are we leaving for the mountain,” one of them asked their father, who had been staying out of this. Probably wisely so. Probably because he could have covered this ground in a four minute speech in the car on the way up the ski hill. Mothers.

The local papers haven’t reported whether or not those snow boarders were riding alone when they fell into those tree wells, and frankly it’s none of my business. I just think that for all the young people who go up to “shred” in the fresh “pow pow” after a few days of “dumpage and puking and pissing” snow…who smoke a few bowls and blare agro head banging hard driving music in their helmets, getting after “it”…or even the blithe skiers and snowboarders who are just in it for the innocent fun it is and the french fry breaks and the chance to play in the snow with friends and family and slide down a hill and gain some speed and take in some views…maybe there can be a moment of pause this January in Montana in our little town. Maybe those deaths can be a reminder that Mother Nature is more powerful than human nature will ever be.

For an expansive education about skiing and snowboarding near tree wells, go to this site which was created by a collaboration of the NW Avalanche Institute, Mt. Baker Ski Area, Crystal Mountain and Dr. Robert Cadman.

Silence

I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
I go into the one body
that two make in making marriage
that for all our trying, all
our deaf-and-dumb of speech,
has no tongue. Or I give myself
to gravity, light, and air
and am carried back
to solitary work in fields
and woods, where my hands
rest upon a world unnamed,
complete, unanswerable, and final
as our daily bread and meat.
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.

“VII” from the poem “1994″ by Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997. © Counterpoint, 1998.

May you find this silence in 2011.
yrs.
Laura

I Like Skiing

One of the things I love about blogging is that you put yourself out to a global community, and you find kindred spirits. It’s so powerful to admit my weaknesses and observations and little vanities here, and have them meet with people from all sorts of different countries and cultures and social groups. I especially love how people are so willing to share with integrity and vulnerability. I know I say this over and over, but I’m so grateful for that. To that end…I will share with you about a little issue I have…and one which yesterday, I put to rest.

I have lived in a ski town for seventeen years. This would be the answer to many people’s prayers. There are hundreds of people who live in my town who work whatever job(s) they can find just so they can soar down that ski hill. I am not one of them. I have never felt comfortable on skis. I can’t really deal with the whole scene, plummeting down the mountain in total white out so that you can’t see whether you’re on ice or a foot of carved up snow until you are upon it, in temps so cold your nose hurts, people careening down all around you, cutting you off. I say over and over, “I like skiing, I like skiing” the whole way down. Until I get to the chair lift and fanataszie about the hot cocoa I’m going to have at the lodge, but then think about how much money it costs for a lift ticket and force/guilt myself to go up again. To be apart of what my children and husband adores and my town’s culture. In the lift line, it’s all about the fresh pow pow and the gnarly moguls and the forecasted snow which is described by words like puking, dumping, croaking and vommiting. And then there’s the ride up on the chairlift which contains the possibility of dangling fifty feet in the air for a long long time, due to mechanical issues– a lot of fun for a person who likes to ask the question, “How do I get out of here,” and have a logical answer. I’m the one who knows where the exit row is on an airplane, for instance. The one in front, and the one behind. In other words, I’m a real treat to ski with. Usually I get left behind by my family. Usually I ski alone. So in the last years, usually I don’t go up at all. I am what you might refer to as a ski-widow. Luckily, wintertime makes me want to write books so I’m home all weekend by the fire, writing, and cooking something yummy for my family to enjoy upon their return.

But yesterday I had a come-to-Jesus conversation with myself. My family was going up skiing and the kids complained that I never join them. It was a stunning day– not too cold, not a cloud in the sky, views of Glacier National Park all the way down through the valley to Flathead Lake. The snow conditions were stable the way I like them, and so really…I had no excuse. So I went. Both of my kids ran into friends in the parking lot and off they went. “See you at the lodge at the end of the day,” they chimed. I wasn’t about to MAKE them ski with me. And my husband got called in to work before the first run. So I spent the day skiing, alone. BUT I refused to feel sorry for myself.

I decided I’d do an experiment. I’d go slowly and pay attention. I’d pretend like I’d never skiied before in my life. Like I’d never seen a mountain peak or even snow. Like everthing was new to me– the pines laden with snow like ghosts, the chairlift, a miracle invention, allowing me to have those views, those fiberglass skiis a genius appendage I could strap on and slide on like a kid in a candy store. I took away all the pressure of being any good at this thing I’ve battled with for seventeen years. This thing you can’t buy a cup of coffee around here without hearing about. This “club” that I’m not really apart of. I would just be with the moment of snow underfoot. And I would go as slowly as possible. I would stop. I would take a half an hour to get down the mountain. I would carve my turns instead of formlessly speeding down the mountain to get it over with. I would lie on my back in the sun and be thankful for vitamin D in all this season of grey and fog. And you know what? I had a great day. It’s amazing what can happen when we go easy on ourselves, remove our head noise– all the shoulds and musts and what ifs…and just be with the moment.

A Nest in the Hand…

Every year we go to this Christmas tree farm and cut down a Frasier fir. We make a day out of it. We listen to Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra singing old Christmas tunes in the car on the way there. We laugh. The adults act like children and the children act like smaller children. We bring hot cider in a thermos and peppermint bark candy and sometimes a little whiskey for my husband and me.  We are easy on each other.

It took us a while to get our tradition right. One year, the year our first child was born, we were frazzled enough to go to a Christmas tree yard in town. We spent $90.00 on the most gorgeous Frasier fir. That sounded about right. We’d recently moved to Montana from the city. That’s about what a Frasier fir ran. I asked the cashier where the tree was from, assuming that it was at least from some little corner of Montana. “Wisconsin,” she said, smiling. Probably cut down in September, sprayed with green preservative, and shipped out here in a truck. We agreed would would NOT tell anyone where our tree was from that year.

Then for a few years, we used to go out in the woods and cut down a tree, but we didn’t like how we went from environmentalists to opportunists, stalking the perfect tree, looking suddenly at the forest like a decorator’s showroom, considering taking the full tops off 30 foot trees just for our living room pleasure. The Charlie Brown trees that needed to be thinned were not enough for our years of inherited and collected ornaments. No that had to stop. A farmed tree was always meant for one purpose, and it usually had been loved and nurtured by someone who needed the extra cash come Christmas time.

So every year we go to this farm, and every year I feel a wash of newness and simplicity. We are kind to each other on this day. We know to take it slowly, marching around in the snow, shaking hands with trees to make sure we don’t end up with a dread prickly spruce. We have fake arguments about who picked the keeper last year, who will find the prize this year. We pretend we hear its call. We let our kids carry saws when they were too young, the punchy snow so forgiving. We take turns with the cut. We giggle and clap our hands when it finally falls over in a little timber that couldn’t really hurt anyone if it tried. We love watching my husband drag it through the snow like he’s just bagged a buck that will feed our family for the winter. Like it’s a hundred years ago. And it is like it’s a hundred years ago. No one pushes any buttons. No one has anything pressed to their ear except for maybe a wet mitten. I love this day.  We all love this day.

And maybe for this reason, the last two years, something really beautiful has occured. As we erect the tree getting ready to proudly mount it atop the truck, my husband, with his dirty XL manly work gloves deep in its branches, stops and sighs and says, “A nest!” And we all peer in and sure enough, there’s a nest. “That’s pro,” my ten year old son said this year. “Of course it’s pro,” said my fourteen year old daughter. “It’s a bird nest. All birds are pros.” And that big work glove carefully extracts a tight, dried mud nest, woven with horse hair, and full of flaxen larch needles. I have last year’s nest on my windowsill in my office, and will put this year’s next to it as a reminder of what it is to receive life’s little gifts, especially at Christmas time. I like to think that nature showers those who are open to its gifts.

Icelandic lore says that a bird nest in a Christmas tree means a year of health and fortune for the whole family. I wish health and fortune to the family that meets at THESE HERE HILLS. Happy 2011 to you all from Montana.

Stumble

A flock of wild turkeys in Montana

I have a friend who says that he goes to church because something always happens. I take a walk in the woods at dusk for the same reason. It’s a little tricky this time of year in the snow. But this is what I came upon last night, wandering around. Where do they go in the cold? Why do they let me walk past them when they have likely been shot at by people of my shape and vertical stature and smell? How do they think of nighttime and darkness? How do we burden ourselves by being afraid of the dark? Or too cozy in our houses? May you go out into the dusk this weekend wherever you are. May you stumble upon something that stuns you into questions, and then better, into not knowing their answers. Peace.

 

Marching by Jim Harrison (my favorite writer)

At dawn I heard among bird calls
the billions of marching feet in the churn
and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet
still wet from the mother’s amniotic fluid,
and very old halting feet, the feet
of the very light and very heavy, all marching
but not together, criss-crossing at every angle
with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump
into each other, walking in the doors of houses
and out the back door forty years later, finally
knowing that time collapses on a single
plateau where they were all their lives,
knowing that time stops when the heart stops
as they walk off the earth into the night air.

Bushwacking the Brain Cage

I published this on my blog a few years ago before anyone really read it. I think it captures what it is to live in Montana on many levels and I hope you enjoy it. yrs. Laura

“And it was a cool fall day, just the right kind of day to burn the slash pile back behind the barn. And I did everything right, you know—I even made a trail of fuel out to an igniting stick and lit it that way. And I didn’t use gasoline like some of these young kids do—I used lighter fluid. I even let it fume off before I lit it.” She was sucking wind behind me, in time with her horse—always in time with her horse.
I wasn’t really listening to her. I was tired that morning and her stories could be heavy, grim, mystical, wise. She’d been a latch key kid—locked into the house while her parents worked at the aluminum factory, everyone dropping dead of cancer around them. “Aluminum’s bad shit,” she liked to say with a fierce take-my-medicine smile, “And I gave up swearing a long time ago.” She’d died on an operating table once, a few months after a tractor had rolled over on her husband and left her with two small boys. “I wanted out,” she said. “But I heard a voice commanding me to come back. I had more work to do.” They were so broke one year, all she’d been able to give her boys for Christmas was a candy bar each. “They still say it was their favorite Christmas.” Second husband alcoholic. Third child Downs. Still grieving the death of her dog, Bonnie—hit by a logging truck, chasing after her on her horse. “Bonnie lived for the trail. Herder. Australian Shepherd.”
I wasn’t in the mood for grim stories, mystical or otherwise. I was trying to make Montana an easy place this morning. A place where I belonged. Where no tractors would roll over my husband and we would be rich and my dog would live forever. I made little vein strokes at deflecting her voice, tiny really, looking for coyote dens in the ridge, noting signs of bear digging for grub in the tree stumps.
“And the burn was going well—I’ve burned a thousand slash piles in my life. Even before Quil died. But then, this terrific wind came out of nowhere. It was like it had hit up against the canyon wall, turned a corner and come around double force. And the flame…just flew. And before I could do anything, it swallowed up this huge Ponderosa in thirty foot flames.” She rode up alongside me then, and I slowed for her, because her voice was suddenly not tiny. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before. And I’m going to cry now too.”
I glanced at her. I’d never seen her cry. It scared me. She was my teacher.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I’m telling you, Laura…I heard the tree scream.” She wiped her whole face with the sleeve of her flannel shirt. “I’m sorry.” Then she whispered—a mighty sound that filled the woods. “I heard it. It screeeeeeeamed.”

***
I was standing in flip-flops in Whitefish Lake in August, cooling my legs when I heard a mother screaming, “Help me. Help me!” And I looked at her, hurling herself to shore hand over hand. “My son!” And I followed her sheet-white gape to a small boy floating head first in three inches of water. Then, clumsy footed, I ran as fast as the water would let me, catching flip-flops on rocks and tripping until my hand could, yes, reach for him and yes, grab him by the back of his T-shirt and pull him… yes, up to air. And I placed him in his mother’s arms before I stopped to see if there would be the…yes, gasp.
***
I was bushwhacking on horseback with a sixty-year old woman who cured herself from pancreatic cancer. That’s because that’s how she likes to ride: off trail. Off-trail, because that is how she has not-died. Lived.
I was a little scared. I have the directional abilities of a blindfolded person. But I know that horses always know which direction is home.
We were picking our way through a sloppily logged forest with gangly root balls and old sapling snags left for dead. For three hundred year old Ponderosas and Larch. We were quiet because it was a little like the time I visited the beaches of Normandy with my World War II veteran father, on a sunny day, fifty years later, when I asked him, “Do you feel guilty that you didn’t fight in the war? That you were never sent over seas?” And he said, “Oh a little maybe. I also felt lucky.”
My cancer survivor friend and I both have wooden homes. “It’s sad the way they take the trees,” she said.
Suddenly I saw the glint off her stirrup and her foot in the air and then a sapling snag stabbed through her stirrup. It caught and held…and then snapped. She started lilting to the left, lilting…and then her horse bucked. She fell to the ground– hit her head, left side and legs simultaneously, bounced, and then she was still.
Her horse stopped a few inches from her head and then turned, stepping over her with his back feet, and trotted by us, snorting and panting, hiding.
“I’m coming for you!” I screamed mostly as a prayer that she would respond. We were ten miles out in the backwoods of Montana on land logged and forgotten until the next “crop” is big enough to “harvest.”
“No! Get my horse!” she screamed. And then made sounds that I had only heard in childbirth.
I dismounted and stood there, holding my horse, knowing that I might need this transport. That this creature of gentleness and warm nuzzle was in this moment one of speed and transport and rescue. I turned two circles trying to decide whom to go to first: her? Or her horse? This horse that she had bought after she had been diagnosed and given three months to live, and healed through. And lives and bushwhacks and loses fear through now, five years later.
“I can’t feel anything!” she howled.
“I’m going to get you out of here! I’m going to take care of you! I’m coming!”
“No! Get my horse!”
And I wanted to. I wanted to turn from her, and do what I knew I could do, what I’ve been training to do: talk horse. Convince him that I would keep him safe if only he would come to me– that pact between horse and human that is a perfect match of will and need. And I took a few steps toward him, steaming in the shadows of a mossy cliff.
But she moaned. And I knew that I had to walk the other way, toward her, whether we lost her horse or not, into what I have had no training for. None.
When I came to her, she looked like a rag doll left behind in the woods by a little girl. She was smiling. Pale and sweating. Her glasses broken. “Everybody thought I was crazy when I decided to move to Montana,” she said.
I put my hand on her forehead the way my mother used to when I was scared in the night.
“You’re shaking,” she said.
With every lying bone in my body I said, “You look beautiful. And you’ve been through worse. We’re going to get you out of here.”
She nodded. “I can’t move my left shoulder. And I can’t breathe in deeply. Musta cracked a few ribs. And my head is just…throbbing.”
“You hit hard. I think I should go for help.”
“No. I’m going to walk out of here. Just get my horse.” And slowly, she stood, broken, moaning, crying God! God! I took these as old prayers she knew well. And went for her horse.
It took us all day, but we got out—all four of us. And at the road, with home in sight, she said, “I think maybe this is the exact reason why I moved to Montana.”

***
It was hunting season. And the deer were flying out of the woods, crazy and catapult. It seemed like there wasn’t a day of picking my kids up from school that we didn’t pass a fleshy mound being picked at by Magpies, followed by a ten yard slick of blood-stained highway. Sometimes broken glass or pieces of fender in the ditch. It got so common that my two year old learned how to pronounce his R’s on the phrase, “Dead deer.” Then we were walking home from the neighbors’ under a full moon, and we heard a collision out on the highway, a quarter mile away. And then screaming. And we ran, where we weren’t sure—to the house for the phone—to call 911? Or to the woman screaming on the highway, three times as far away, screaming, My baby! My baby!
“Why aren’t we going to the lady?” my daughter shouted as we turned up our half-mile long driveway at an adults’ pace, our lungs tight and burning.
“Because I can’t help her. I’m not a doctor.”
“But she wants help and we’re leaving her there.”
“This is what we’re doing. Just keep running.”
After the 911 call, we waited in my daughter’s bed and watched the red lights out on the highway, little fast spinning planets in the huge horizon.
“Shouldn’t we go down there? And help? If the mama is hurt, she might need us to hold her baby.”
“They have the help they need.” Which was euphemism for, I’m too scared to look that woman’s fear in the eye.
In the headlines, a few days later, we saw a photo of the accident. In the comfort of our Sunday morning coffee and wool socks, we were able to look at what happened. A moose had flushed. Her husband had been killed on impact. There was no baby.
***
Our friend was buried in an avalanche. The guy he was back-country skiing with found him and dug him out. I saw them both at the bar the next week. They said they had just bought new avalanche transmitters the morning of the ordeal. That their old ones wouldn’t have done the trick. Our friend looked fine. Light. He was telling jokes and drinking beer. The guy who saved him looked pale and didn’t speak much.
***
My six year old daughter is a future girl. She has a way of making things indelible. She knows she will need certain memories for later. So she engraves them. It’s no foolish play. I’ve watched her. She closes her eyes and touches her temples and breathes. She calls it: my brain cage.
We were lying with our chins on the bow of a boat during the sunset on Whitefish Lake this summer. The clouds were as tangerine as the sky was cobalt, all in whisps so that the sky could have well been the tangerine and the clouds, the blue. “Remember this moment,” I whispered to my future girl, as if she needs my prompting.
She smiled, accepting my prompt graciously. “Eighteen down. Two thousand hundred and eighteen to go,” she said.

***
Tonight my husband went out to burn the slash pile. It is a cool December night; no wind; a good night for a burn. He brought our daughter out to watch from a distance. He covered the pile in fuel. He made a trail to an igniting stick. I went in the house to keep myself from saying, “Do you really think she should be out there with you?”
And as I was shutting the door, the house shook. And then a huge boom blew into my ears and stunned my brain so that I stood there for a moment, not knowing where I was exactly; in a house somewhere, in a hallway of my life.
I went to the window, half expecting to see my mother and father as young parents, my brother and sister playing tag in the front yard. Wondering if they would let me play just this once. And there was my husband, on his knees, shoveling snow into his face.
I, quick, scanned the scene for my child. And there she was, with her back to her father, her fingers on her temples like she was fighting to keep this image out of her brain cage.
I ran to her and held her and said, “Are you okay?” and she nodded and shook. And I went to her father and stood back when I saw his face—red with white raven’s claws fanning out from his eyes. The smell of singed hair. “I’m okay,” he said, looking an instant five years older. “I’m okay.”
And I looked at the slash pile, roaring with a tangerine blaze against a cobalt sky. Gaining altitude. Licking at the sunset. And then, it fell in to itself. And that was when I heard it. I heard it scream.
The people were silent, watching.
There is no easy Montana. Can you hear it? Can you hear it?

The Sculptor Adrian Arleo

Check out her newest work at the Jane Sauer Gallery in Santa Fe:

A few years ago, I had the honor of writing a piece for Western Art and Architecture magazine about the sculptor Adrian Arleo. While Adrian and her husband, the writer David Duncan, had been my friends for quite some time, I had never really asked her about her process and her work to the extent that I did for that writing assignment. Put it this way, if the paperback version of my book goes ballistic, I would like an Adrian Arleo sculpture perched on a shelf behind my writing desk, being my witness and begging the muse. If I could build a room and fill it with her work, I would. Here’s an excerpt of the article:

The result is bewitching. Her sculptures seem alive and intimately so, like we’ve stumbled upon them in the woods in some sort of spell of transformation, “perhaps as we ourselves are transformed in our fantasies, intuitions and dreams.” Her figures are recognizable, but not so representational that we feel the need to label or define them. The looseness of her style allows for an immediate empathy that both looms and sings somewhere between the dark depths of pathos and the light layers of stillness… (read more here)

Advertising with Integrity– only 15 spots, offered first to you, my dear readers

I need your input. I have so loved this blog and all the amazing people who show up here sometimes daily to read and comment. It really is all that I hoped it would be when I set out to begin it a few winters ago. This was before my book was published and I was sick of writing and not having readers. I did it on a whim and slogged my way through figuring out the admin and how to post etc. As a techno peasant, it was slow going. But now I can’t imagine NOT having this forum for sharing. I have made friends here, all over the world. We have shared stories from the heart and there has been so much integrity in the way in which people show up.

I have some old school writer friends who have enjoyed long-lived careers in books, and they simply cannot understand why I would spend so much time writing these little pieces and accompanying them with photos. They don’t understand why I’d run out of my writing room in a storm to photo the hail on the poppies and rush to get it on my blog. But that’s because it’s not on their radar. They’re used to living the unwitnessed life in their rooms of their own, and they’re happy that way. I used to tell myself I was too, but it’s lonely in my office, my husband and kids off at school and work, and me with a novel to write. I have been hard at it for so long and have my practice, my craft, what I do in a novel, very much in balance. But there are other windows of time here and if I lived in the city, maybe I’d fill them with art galleries or cafes or street music. One can only walk in the woods so long before one begins to wonder if she fell in the woods and no one was there to hear her fall, if she really fell at all.

To that end, I have loved being here, sharing my Montana-kissed life, and meeting you in words and images. It means the world to me. And while I love the no-advertising component I’ve chosen, this cow girl needs to do more to help support her family and I think there’s a way to keep it “PBS” esque, and have advertisements. I’d like to put this out to you before I start shopping around: I am wanting to find products out there, and when I say out there I mean wherever you are as I have readers in Australia, Israel, Belguim, you name it, that speak to the kind of integrity that we find here at THESE HERE HILLS. I want to support and champion people who are creating things that inspire people; that make the world a better place, that challenge us to think, and give us haven from the storm that life can sometimes deal. I want to get behind these products, places, people, and do more than just have them shine on the banner and along the sides of my blog, but give them cyber “ink,” featuring them in long term committment and connecting them to other writers and powers-that-be which might help get the word out on their behalf.

I would love your ideas for potential advertisers, especially if you are one of those people who has something you’d like to promote here. I promise that I will never change the tone of THESE HERE HILLS. I’ve turned down all kinds of advertising offers which don’t at all feel right for what we’re doing here together on this site. My hope is that my readers might be inspired by someone out there who has created something that appeals to them and which they might want in their lives in some capacity.

I have a 15 ad cap right now, so I’m offering this opportunity here first. You can email me at Laura@lauramunsonauthor.com for more details. I’m excited about this. I have always had a hard time putting a price to something. I had a lemonade stand as a kid and used to just give it away. But you can’t just give it away. Not always. Not when you wouldn’t mind health insurance again. And when the bills stack up…and up…and up. There’s a way to support each other in what we create without selling out. That’s who I am in this. And I want this platform I’ve created to do the same for others. Thanks and let me know. yrs. Laura

Begging the Bear

I went for the smell of wild roses pulsing in the vanilla of Ponderosas. For the June blues and purples: penstamon, flax, lupine, geranium. I went for the ninety-degree heat and cobalt skies after so many months by the wood stove, wearing a shawl. I went for the view from the ridge, to see what my valley looks like, green. I went to remind my horse that I am his leader in a fence less place. I went for sunburned shoulders.

My horse sees her first. Ups his head, pricks his ears.

“Hello?” she shouts up to me. “Could you wait a moment?”

We wait there on the ridge. You wouldn’t not.

“Say, I was wondering if you might come with me up the trail a bit. Seems like Logan and I can’t ride out here without a bear encounter. Just saw a mama and three cubs. Logan here doesn’t like bears. Doesn’t like the sight of them. Doesn’t like the smell of them. Of course, the whole woods smell like bear this time of year. It’s funny—the bears never used to bother him.”

I take in a clandestine sniff. Smells to me like roses and Ponderosas.

Read the rest here at the Parelli blog

The Smell of Snow

It’s hunting season again in Montana which always means the end of roaming around in the woods behind my house for a few weeks. And then the snow comes. Today it came. A world of white for many weeks now. This is a piece I wrote about it years ago, when I was becoming a Montanan and learning to re-train my awareness of the natural world.

THE SMELL OF SNOW by Laura Munson (Excerpt) Read the rest on the Huffington Post! Feel free to comment there.

First day of hunting season. I awake to a hot crrr-ack in the field at dawn. It is the same hot crack of split wood. In its echo, the same sad promise of winter fuel.

It is not my husband. He won’t shoot anything with eyelashes anymore. I sit up in bed and think about this poacher, so lazy or maybe desperate for his buck that he has to sit illegally in my meadow in the dark, quite possibly in my driveway in the comfort of his truck. Maybe he can’t stand the hunt, not unlike my husband. Just needs to feed his family. I am not angry at this person. It is too complicated to be angry about the reasons for which one creature kills another.

It has been a stunning October, with sapphire skies everyday, like it thinks it’s August. The trees have taken their time, basking in their toward-dormancy-dance. The river birch first, and then the aspen and alder, and now larch needles fall in fair-haired rains. I take my two-year-old son down the stairs every morning, fling open the door and say, “Thank you,” to the day. And he says, “Tenk yoo,” and we ignore the infestation of stink bugs and cluster flies clinging to our house, betting their lives on the exact reverse of this moment.

This morning I add to our thanks, “It smells like snow.”

Read more here at the Huffington Post.