I’m writing this in a faded armchair that I bought for $30 two winters ago as the heater whirs, while wearing my nana’s slippers and listening to the Liquid Mind station. The porch light illuminates the snow as it falls on a grounded raft and drift boat in the front yard, now buried in white. My husband’s elk antlers, a map of the world and photos of places I haven’t seen in years are above and around me in our Philipsburg home – I think it sums up the “then and now” I’m feeling tonight as I tap away on my laptop.
Example: a year ago this weekend I had my first taste of Las Vegas. We stayed on the 17th floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino with floor to ceiling windows that looked over empty wave pools, fake beaches, and red desert cliffs. We ate crab legs and steak; I got an hour-long massage and had my toes painted red with gold sparkles, then we went out for sushi and had cocktails that equaled our utilities bill for December.
Two months before this, I impulsively bought a cheap ticket to New York City, experiencing Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens – another first time – with my best friend from kindergarten. It was fall; we went for walks through Central Park eating warm nuts, stood in line for tickets to an off-Broadway show for an hour as everything around us in Times Square lit up. At 2 a.m. on Sunday we were drinking jalapeno-laced cosmopolitans on a rooftop bar that looked up to the Empire State Building; by Monday afternoon I was back in Philipsburg, eating a rye bagel with an onion garlic cream cheese at my desk that I had brought back in my carry-on from Ess-a-bagel on 3rd Avenue in Midtown East.
I spent a lot of time in transit these last 12 months – thankfully I was in transit for lovely, fulfilling reasons that are fun to reflect on in this armchair as the snow falls at the start of 2017.
In September I caught the tail-end of summer in Martha’s Vineyard during a writers’ residency I had applied to at the start of 2016. I had a white room with a porch that looked out on the main street of Edgartown with seven other housemates. When I wasn’t writing, I was riding a bike all over the island, swimming, eating lobster in the rough just off the boats, and sampling beach plum jam from roadside stands and grabbing fistfuls of grapes from vines that hung heavy, entwined in the lower branches of trees near the sand dunes. When I flew back into Missoula in the late afternoon in October, John met me with my hiking pack filled with my warmest clothes, so I could take off the next morning at 5 a.m. for my first horse pack trip in the Bitterroots during a winter weather warning.
It felt like I’d hardly had time to do my laundry and drink a cup of coffee on my couch before we were off again in November, with a wedding dress on a hanger, wrapped in plastic and draped over our hiking packs and stacks of sleeping bags, roll mats and pillows in the back of the truck – this time on a marathon drive to California with John to get married in my hometown. I don’t think either of us slept more than four hours a night for ten days. The weather was too beautiful, our friends had traveled too far, and there was too much pigeon crap to scrap off the dance floor in the barn we were having our reception in on a Saturday evening (my dad and brother heroically did this so we could have our bachelor/bachelorette parties on the Thursday before we got hitched) to think about going to bed before 3 a.m. most nights.
Our journey back to Philipsburg was a three-week honeymoon/roadtrip up the coast of California and Oregon, before cutting across through Washington. We ate, we drank, we played our wedding playlist with the windows down in the sun, all the way up the coast of Big Sur, Bodega Bay, the Lost Coast; and kept playing it as the weather cooled going north, with rain pounding the truck as we continued up through Yachats and Manzanita, spending Thanksgiving in a yurt with friends as the winds whipped the canvas around us.
I could feel it building, but I don’t think I fully anticipated the force of my homing instinct when we opened up the door to our house in December and turned on the lights and the heat.
I pretty much collapsed face down on the couch and did this long exhalation. Then I slept for the next three days. I don’t think our house has ever felt so good to me.
This has been such a gorgeous year of adventure. Life in this armchair in a 15 x 20 square foot living room tonight feels very small and contained in comparison. But it also feels right – it meets me where my mind space is now.
As the snow keeps falling on this January night in Montana, I have to say how sweet it feels to want to be exactly where I am.
[A version of this post appeared as a column in the Philipsburg Mail on January 12]
