Suddenly, after weeks of coming and going, it is nearly June and we are back at our house in Philipsburg, teetering on the edge of summer, with no intention of going anywhere outside Montana. I put a calendar up on the wall just outside our kitchen last weekend. It’s hung there, completely blank as May comes to a close, stretching out like an empty, calm ocean.
The sun comes up early and bright through our white curtains. It is still barely there when I come home from work late at night, with windows down so I can smell the pine trees and the fresh rain on the dirt road, as I pull onto Skalkaho.
Late April and May had been about suitcases and packs laid on the bed or the dining room floor. It’s been 4 a.m. starts and dashes to the airport and seeing sunrises through bloodshot eyes, from a cramped seat, thousands of feet up, flying above the clouds. It’s been dragging a suitcase up the steps of our house after midnight and falling into an unmade bed, feet still sandy from the beach I had one last run on that morning. It’s been a gift to see old friends and family this Spring. But there is a huge part of me that wants to wake up and curl up under heavy blankets, turn on music and watch the newly green hills and listen to birds and cattle being moved. To only go as far as the hardware store for eggs and a new hook for the back yard hammock. This little house and ramshackle yard, with a kitchen sink that looks out to Discovery Ski Hill is the longest I have lived in one house as an adult. In August it will be four years.
I look out to our neighbors’ tree in full white bloom, above a fence built almost 40 years ago, that might just make it through one more summer. That tree is a transplant from the mountains around us. The frame of the hammock I bought last August for my birthday is still a skeletal outline above the grass that is almost brushing my calves when I take coffee and toast with me into the yard. I wake to the sound of lawn mowers starting up. That purr is the sound of summer beginning, something I never thought much about when I was growing up in the temperate California climate. But here, it is as tied to this new season as the sound of Rock Creek rushing at the banks when I go to my car at night. Two months ago, I was still trudging through the dark in my boots, sloshing through potholes of muddy snow. Now, there’s just the sound of my flip flops and I’m walking along in a t-shirt, the night breeze like a cool balm on my bare arms.
This time last year the first wildfires of the summer were starting. Now we are eating the morel mushrooms that exploded with the new growth from the scorched earth, our eyes on the clear skies, not taking the air we are breathing for granted so much. There are music festivals and river floats to plan for. Our camper is already de-tarped and parked in a clearing by a creek in the Big Hole, where my husband will be fly-fishing through much of June and where the dog and I will be spending weekends, drinking percolator coffee in the mornings and reading by a fire, dusty feet in sleeping bags.
That’s about all the adventuring I can muster right now. That feels just fine to admit that.
