All of the sudden, summer is here.

  This will be my eighth one in Montana, and just saying that makes me feel both old and grateful.

It seems like another lifetime when I was driving from California in early June, arriving in Big Sky just before the sun was up, everything I owned packed into the used Saturn I had just bought for $1499, hoping it would just get me through the first season in my new home. I got out of the car, and stood there in the driveway, listening to the roar of the creek, deafening with spring runoff, and then birds everywhere in the first light. I had just arrived back in the exact place where I had spent the winter, but that place had been transformed. The snow, the quiet, the hushed darkness that I had cross-country skied through during the previous five months was gone. In its place was a land that was full of light, color, noise – not just birds and water, but wind in the leaves, in the waist-high green grasses; of cattle being moved; of horses released to the fields in the evening. It filled me with energy I didn’t know I was missing. I had only been gone from Montana for two months but it was another landscape I was returning to.

  I grew up in a temperate California climate where winters were almost irrelevant. I spent a decade in New Zealand, where summers were short and stormy months, potentially brilliant, with equal potential for disappointment. To me, Montana summers have everywhere else beat. Maybe it’s the brevity. Maybe it is the long winters that build up the anticipation. Maybe it is the suddenness of its arrival. It is long in coming. But every year it delivers.

  It is soft and warm. Gentle at first, then just when the heat you’ve been longing for gets a little too much to take, there are these storms that roll through, reminding you to just stop and bask in warmth while warmth is here. One storm arrived just as I was leaving work last week and a few of us stopped what we were doing and took a moment to watch its approach from the doorway. Even the summer in Montana has different moods, shades and smells – seasons within a season. For people who struggle with restlessness, this is a made-to-order landscape, changing every few hours. There isn’t enough time to get tired of it.

  Last summer felt stolen to me, first by a pandemic and then by morning sickness. I had enough energy after work in the evenings to do a faceplant into the couch and eat grape popsicles and chew on ice, until even the smell of water – even frozen – made me nauseous.

  This June, I feel like a corralled horse, anxiously pacing, watching the rest of the herd thunder past me for the hills. I am not the same woman who rolled into town in a beat-up Saturn eight years ago, arriving in this house I had rented from an online posting, unseen, and upon stepping into the lounge room, hearing my own footsteps echo on the wooden floors, thought, ‘how am I going to fill up all this space?’

  I laugh at that now, as I rock Eliza, now 4 months, with Jessie dragging her whale-themed potty around the house like a big teddy bear. This space has been filled.

  There is an Australian journalist I follow on social media, who gave birth a month before I did, and captures motherhood in a way that always has me nodding.

  “The phrase, ‘you can have it all, just not at once,’ keeps skittering around in my brain,” she wrote in a post I read at 3 a.m., as Eliza snoozed on my chest. “It’s not my turn for sleep-ins and long leisurely yoga classes and writing when the muse pokes her tousled head through the door. It is my turn to squint with one eye at the watch when I hear a yell from next door, and be delighted at wide new eyes looking at the world and wipe poo from between shoulder blades and wonder how the bloody hell it got there.”

  That Saturn that got me here is long gone. My arms are so full, especially during the summer  when I lose my husband to the guiding season.

  This last week I’ve watched from my couch, trapped by blankies and baby arms, my neighbor loading up to go ride her horse. Her kids are grown; she is a grandmother now. She swings her saddle into the bed of the truck and my shoulder muscles move vicariously through hers.

  Someday, it will be my turn to throw a saddle in the back of a truck on a bright summer morning. 

  For now, I am here, arms full, heart full, jiggling a baby rocker with my big toe as I write this, corralled. It’s my turn to be right here.