Last week I realized that driving with my husband to work in the evenings has become my favorite block of time this winter.
I didn’t think this would be so in January. When two people live together and also work evenings together in a bar and dining room (our workplace is The Ranch at Rock Creek – and yes – this area is as gorgeous as it appears on their website), there’s always that chance that one, or both of us, will feel like we’re in each other’s spheres a little too much.
During the day, it can feel like a hustle from the time we wake up and the hot water kettle starts to boil. Both of us have projects we’re juggling. Each morning is different, depending on what is most immediate. No matter what I’m working on, I always feel a little haunted by the hundred other things that also need to be prioritized. I overestimate how much I can complete, then I get frustrated  with myself when 2 p.m. rolls around. I get dressed for work, dogged by the long list that hasn’t been checked off, put on my outside boots and cram my makeup bag into my oversize work lapel that seems to be ballooning more and more each week with day planners and random bits and pieces of projects that need to be filed, and grumpily track John to the truck, feeling like a mess.
But I’ve found that something happens when I shut the passenger door and we start rolling out of town and take a left at the highway. Philipsburg disappears behind us and we are in ranch land. The houses become smaller. Right at the place where I start to lose cell phone reception, all those pressing actions that need my attention, start to feel just a fraction less important.
When it has been snowing, we take our time, both of us focused only on the drifts that blow in gusts across the road as we slow to a crawl. The barbed wire fences fly past us. I’ll watch the cattle cluster together, their dark forms sometimes the only way to orientate distance in the bare, white hills that would lose dimension without these markers. I’ll see that one tiny, structure, still there after decades, maybe a century, all by itself in all that snow as it passes my window and wonder how it is still upright. It looks so small in this landscape – something about it always makes me want to turn the heater up a few degrees.
Sometimes we listen to a podcast as we drive and watch the scenery around us: the same mountain peaks that are perfectly framed over our kitchen sink window loom on our left; on the right, the tree line starts to meet us as we come around the corner and drop back down into the woods. Most of the time it’s the same country music station that fades in and out of reception as we talk. I’ll peel an orange that I’ve brought with me and hand half to John. When I’m done putting on mascara and put my makeup bag away – always before the road gets bumpy – he’ll take my hand and we’ll just drive in silence.
As the weeks have become months, the snow has receded. When we wake up and the hot water kettle whistles, I’ll often open a window instead of turning on the heater. There is grass under my boots instead of snow when I walk to the truck behind John. Beyond the fence lines as we drive, newborn calves rise shakily to their feet. The slushy roads that required four-wheel drive at this time last month, now have dust rising up in clouds behind us. It is spring.
And with this new season are the strange weather patterns that disorientate me. Hours after driving that last stretch of dirt road to work, I’ll look out across the basin to see what looks to be even more dust coming my way. Then I realize it’s a rogue snow flurry, like the last death rattles of winter.
This is my final week commuting with my husband, as he prepares for his season as a fly-fishing outfitter. April is a gentle start for him, but once the season gets going, we will be like two ships passing until late September.
Maybe a shared commute is the most ordinary of half hours. But I’m realizing it’s one of the winter routines that I will miss.

[A version of this column appeared in a March edition of the Philipsburg Mail]