News you can use
News you can use
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I've been thinking about how all along the Hi-Line small towns are shrinking and how we need to give serious thought to economic development. Actually, I was giving serious thought to my next vacation when this problem and its perfect solution popped into my brain. What started this thought process was my fingernails. After this long and bitterly cold winter, my fingernails are fragile, almost brittle. Contemplating my nails led me to memories of my last vacation in Mazatlan, along the west coast of Mexico, with my friend...
Last fall in Chinook I saw a marvelous play about the great storyteller, Edgar Allen Poe, presented by the talented young actors of the Montana Repertory Theatre. One thing I took home from this play, and that has stuck with me, is the idea of "Poe Moments." Poe Moments are those wonderfully evil thoughts we all typically have when confronted with an annoying person or situation. Unless one is a psychotic serial killer, and let's assume we are not, we do not act on the thoughts; we sweep them beneath the rug of consciousness....
We drove south out of Dodson, up onto the plateau and out toward the mountains. We passed the turn off at the long dirt road to the place where I used to live, a life-time ago. I recognized the same barbed-wire gate. Sun dappled the hills. A slight breeze teased the grasses. A perfect day. Signs marked "Auction" pointed us in the right direction. Oak pallets, each heaped with an assortment of goods, snaked across the field. Beyond the pallets, lined out like an old-soldiers honor guard at a funeral, slumped dozens of derelict...
Along with hundreds of other folks from the Hi-Line, from cities and towns throughout Eastern Montana and with a few tourists from our sister state, Western Montana, I celebrated a shared heritage at the 61st Annual Montana Seed Show in Harlem last weekend. I like that it is called the "Montana" Seed Show, not the "Harlem" Seed Show. It demonstrates an inclusiveness that reaches beyond regionalism. And in a historically appropriate way, it took place at the high school, the traditional hub of every small-town community. The...
I wish I could have returned to Indiana for Aunt JoAnne's funeral. But more than that, I wish I could have been there to spend time with her and with all of you before she died. She was very special to me. My earliest memories of Aunt Jo are of the time when she lived in a handsome brick apartment building on Park Avenue in Indianapolis, before she married Uncle Lee. I thought it the most elegant place. One rode up in an elevator. Her apartment spread over an entire floor with bay windows in front and a back porch with...
I am writing this with profuse apologies to Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose "Locksley Hall," from which this phrase is butchered, goes on and on, and is not one bit cheerful. I promise not to go on and on that much. Until today I had not read this poem since high school, but, inspired by Tennyson, I give you the following florid prose. Now that our drifted snow has melted, my tulips bravely lift their fluted arms toward the sun, nubbins of rhubarb emerge like a phoenix rising from the ashy heap of last year's leaves, the golden...
Back when I lived in the Windy City, I subscribed to the Chicago Tribune, called by its publisher, Colonel McCormick, the "World's Greatest Newspaper." In those days it listed further to the right than any newspaper in existence. This was the paper which ran the famous banner headline: "Dewey Defeats Truman." The Sunday edition was approximately four inches thick and so heavy I had to separate it and drag it into the house one section at a time. If I plunked the whole thing on the coffee table all at once, the legs splayed...
I love trains. And that is a good thing because my home is plunk across the street from the tracks. I never did figure out why my Dad built his house here, where the trains practically run through the living room. He never did say. Maybe Dad liked trains too. I remember summer times when, out in the fields, we would hear the whistle and stop our work to watch the Empire Builder roll by. To this day, when I hear that lonesome whistle blow, I bless Hank Williams and fight off a hankering to hit the rails. Back in high school my...
Shhhhh. Yes, you out there. It's me, Ruth. I've been waiting for a chance to talk with you. Sondra's off in some la-la land daydream, and if we are tip-toe quiet, she might stay there long enough to let me speak. I became part of her life in the hospital in Bangalore, India, where I replaced her bungled up right knee. I am state of the art, you know. Without me she wouldn't have a leg to stand on. How quickly she forgets the day we met. We had been partnered up, so to speak, four days before she finally thought to ask me my...
"You have an overdue book." It was Bev at the Harlem Public Library. "Oh my gosh. I know right where it is." I rustle through a month's worth of papers and documents from various civic meetings, which I had dumped into the wing chair, until I triumphantly heave the book out of the pile. I meant to read it. Really, I did. "I found it. I'll bring it back right away." My face is red. This particular overdue book hangs over my head like a newly sharpened scythe. I really meant to read it. Well, I mean, I knew I should have read i...
It began with an invitation. Katie said, "Come on out Saturday afternoon and help us make lefse." "Wonderful," I answered. "I've only done it once before. Years ago, when I was a young woman, my friend Mary took me with her to visit her motherin- law, and we made lefse." For a moment I was lost in memory. It was a crisp autumn day in Lambert, a few miles due west of Sidney. Mrs. Lake held court over her immense country kitchen, orchestrating a Scandinavian feast. Mary and I were in the center of the fray. Hordes of children...
