by Laura Munson | Nov 24, 2023 | Montana, Musings
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I grew up in a suburb of Chicago with a town square flanked by shoulder-to-shoulder shops in brick and tudor. A fountain on one end, a Parthenon shaped department store on the other, a park with grass and benches, and a flagpole in-between. My goldfish met its maker in that fountain because I thought it a better life than the one he’d been living in a small bowl on my bedroom windowsill. I biked to that fountain every morning before school and met my best friend, and we’d sit on the side of it, eating donuts from the local bakery. I had a kiss or two in the dark at that fountain. I climbed that flagpole on a dare. I believed in the spirit of Christmas each December as I stood in that park, looking into the illumination of the crèche. We called it Uptown and it was an iconic yet controlled kingdom to us, the Downtown of Chicago being so vast and distant, thirty miles away. My house was close to Uptown, and after school every day, I walked my dog around its streets, memorizing every alleyway, every store window, smiling at the familiar faces of the shopkeepers who knew my family, our names, our stories.
In those days, many families had charge accounts at the stores. So sometimes, I’d get permission to go on a little shopping spree: stickers or pens at the stationary store, ribbons at the dimestore, a Bonnie Bell Lipsmacker at the drugstore, a bike bell at the sports store, seeds at the hardware store for my vegetable garden. Not all at once, of course. But here and there on a blue moon, when my parents were feeling extra generous. I’m not sure if I loved the actual item as much as the phrase, “Can you please charge that to our account?” It filled me with a deep sense of belonging to my town. Not just anyone could have a charge account. You had to be local. Very local. I liked being very local.
The shops Uptown, were like icons to us. We had nicknames for them, like old friends. Helanders was He’s. The Left Bank hot dog spot was Pasquesi’s, because that was the owner’s name, of course. Walgreens was Wag’s and that’s before it became a multi-mega drugstore. We grew up with the family. It was local. These shops were our meeting places. Our stomping ground. Our stage. When my father died, the local grocery store, Janowitz, gave us a cart full of groceries for free once they heard the news. These shops were the bones of our goings on as a community. Not because they represented greed or even commerce to us. They were the places where our mothers ran into each other and gossiped and put together a meal train for a family in need. They were the places where we flirted with boys, dreamed up birthday parties, found the right card for a grieving aunt, played truth or dare over an ice cream sundae. A lot of these shops are gone now. Now the shoe store is a Williams Sonoma. The corner store is a Talbots. The hardware store is long gone, a Home Depot beckoning in the not-so-distance. Every time I return to my hometown, I feel sad about how many of the Mom and Pop shops have been taken over by franchises. Lululemon. A Starbucks on steroids. The only thing that’s left is the sporting goods store where all of us got our first bikes. I always go in just to see if it smells the same. It does. The owner’s son is there. He always smiles and says, “Everyone comes in for a whiff when they’re in town.” The Lantern bar is the other establishment that’s still there. Still has the best burger in town. Some of our pictures are on the wall. Over the years, I have been proud of the way my hometown values its local shops and supports them, even with so much bright-light-big-city so close. But now there are so many fallen soldiers in the way of local, family-owned, commerce, and it saddens me. We belonged to those places. I don’t feel like I belong to my town square of origin anymore.
Somehow, I ended up living in, and belonging to, another small town— a mountain town in Montana. When I moved here thirty years ago, it was full of economic hardship. There are three blocks of Mom and Pop shops in our town. Over the years, I’ve watched as the shop owners of Central Ave. struggled to make ends meet and keep their doors open. I’ve known most of them the way I knew my hometown shop owners. I watched as they took their vision and made it a reality. They wore their pride because in our small mountain community, these shops hold deep importance. There is no option of city. People drive a long way to stock up on feed for their animals, paint for their barns, winter socks for their kids. Not long ago I was proud to say we didn’t have a Gap in the state of Montana. Or a Target, a Best Buy, a Home Depot, a Lowe’s, a Walmart, a Costco. That’s changed now. It’s here. Consumption Junction we call it. And it’s tried very hard to kill our local small businesses. Which is why I choose to do all my grocery shopping at the local health food store and other small markets, buy shoes and clothes at our local outfitters. And even though I’m not a big shopper just for shopping’s sake…from time-to-time I’ll walk Central Ave., and pop into those shops, usually just to have a look around and feel like I’m part of a town center like I did in my hometown. I’ll buy a little something to show my support. And I am filled with such warmth and yes, belonging, every time. Those shop owners have worked hard to keep their inventions alive.
Sure, there are new sorts of shops— shiny ones that announce “we are on the map.” (BTW: we’ve successfully kept Lululemon out!) But I go into those shinier shops too, because even though they don’t represent the sorts of shops I’ve known and loved for decades in this little town, these people are store owners with a vision too. These shops are products of small town dreams. There’s a bar in our town that’s full of all the shop signs that didn’t make it. Every shop owner in our town knows that if their vision doesn’t work, at least the sign will end up on the wall at the Northern. Which, like the bar that lives on in my suburban Chicago town, will also never die. And that’s because it’s as much about gathering as it is about beer. And all the signs on the walls make good stories, because people in a small town, at least our small town, love to tell stories, albeit sometimes stretched. And so what. We get lonely in these here hills.
I always say, “You can judge a town by its hardware store.” And in the last little while…our multi-generational hardware store…got bigger! (And they still have their old fashioned popcorn maker by the front door. You can’t go by that popcorn maker without filling up a bag to eat while you shop, no matter how much of a hurry you are in.) And during the height of the Pandemic…not one Mom and Pop shop closed. Not one. Any upstanding local that I know will always go to Nelson’s before heading down the highway to Consumption Junction. To me, that says a lot about where I’ve lived and raised my kids. And is part of why they have moved back. They don’t make ’em, (and keep ’em), like our town anymore. They just don’t. But our small mountain community ain’t for everyone. It’s hard-living all winter long. Days and days of gray skies. And often, smoky summers. Not a lot of local industry. Still, we thrive. And Central Ave. reminds us of that very fact.
Whether we like it or not, in the summer, our sidewalks are heavy-laden with tourists. But in the off seasons, when it empties out to locals only, sometimes I walk those blocks and have a scary flash that one day Central Ave. will be like a ghost town of the old West, tumbleweed and all, the bars surviving because people will always drink away their woe. The churches surviving because people will always need to pray in public, knowing they’re not alone. Or what if it goes the other way? What if all the Mom and Pop shops are lost to franchises that don’t really understand what our town is truly made of? I deeply (and a bit desperately) don’t want to lose out to franchises, and thus, to what binds a small town in the way of common space: kids riding bikes to the ice cream store, parents lingering over coffee at the local coffee roaster after school drop-off, the kind of place where you know you’re always going to run into someone you know at the market, buying broccoli, and have questions about how (insert family name) is doing. The kind of town where they wrap your Christmas gifts right there, and with loving smiles. The kind of town where you pop into the toy store just to remember what it was to take your kids there to buy their friends’ birthday presents, and the owners catch you lingering in the plastic horse section and shed a smile and a tear with you. They remember too. When I go into a local shop on a mission of nostalgia or just plain curiosity, I usually buy a little something as a way of saying, thank you. I can think of a handful of times when I’ve forgotten my purse and the shop owner said, “Just pay us next time. We know you’re good for it.” I like feeling “good for it.” One time, at the local gas station, the guy behind the counter, who calls me by my last name, said, “Hey, Munson. You like horses, yeah? I got you something.” And he produced a brown paper bag from behind the counter. It was a glass horse figurine. “Was in a little shop the other day and I thought of you.” I wept in gratitude, and yes, belonging. It’s been front-and-center on my nightstand for years. Thanks, Murray.
Sometimes, I admit…I have no other option but to go to a box store. I loathe it, avoid it, dread it…but sometimes have to succumb. Like when I’m looking for doorknobs. Or light fixtures. Or a rug. (Even though I always stop by Nelson’s first!) I muscle through the experience, trying to remember that I’m still supporting the locals who work at those stores. I admit it though: I drive through Consumption Junction and I picture/fantasize a time when the box store will die. When our greed for unnecessary plastic items will fade, if it hasn’t already devoured us. We’ll stop filling up our shopping carts until they are brimming over, when all we came for was…well, socks. And maybe things will return to the old ways. And people will live off the land. And buy only what they need and only when they can afford it. And barter for what they can’t afford. I picture a time when a person with sheep has profound power, shearing them and spinning their fleeces, and a person who knows how to work a forge is the reason why transportation is possible, horses needing shoes— a means of commerce, not just a pet or a creature of recreation. And the Farmer’s Market will be more than a sunny place to listen to a singer/songwriter and buy a hula hoop along with your Swiss chard. In fact, around here, farms are growing and thriving. Maybe we’re closer than we think to the old way of life.
There is a road here called Farm-to-Market. It’s a pretty Sunday drive. When I take that road, I think about how it once was a bloodline for this community. Blood sport. Many broken hearts along its fences. Countless dashed dreams and false hopes. The kind of road where you sort out what you’re going to say to your wife when you come back with a full cart, someone else’s tomato crop being what it was, and sauce to put up for winter. It’s not that I defy modern technology or progress or the possibilities of button pushing. It’s that I don’t trust us to know what to do with what we’ve created. I trust humility more than greed. And as much as I appreciate that I get welcomed into Costco and that I could get a 24 pack of gym socks for my kids and Swiss chard both, and still get back in time to pick them up from school, as much as I know that those are local people working those jobs, in honesty and humility with dreams of their own, sorting out their own stories to tell their spouses or loved ones…I want us to stop.
I want us to go to the local hardware store and eat a bag full of popcorn while we discuss paint color and drill bits, and talk weather while we do it. And what about that school bond and what about that new city councilperson? I want us to drop our spare change into the Mason jar to help with the middle school teacher who has Leukemia. I want us to go slowly again. I want us to wonder about each other. I want us to ask, “How’s business?” and hear that it picked up this October, which is usually a slow time— better than last year. To nod and smile at that good news and feel like we’re going to be okay. We won’t lose our hats along with our dreams.
This holiday season, I want us to stop. Not take our turkey hangovers to the early morning, standing at a Target ready to run in like monkeys on a zoo break. I want us to continue the gratitude of the day before. I want us to sleep in and maybe take a walk into town later to see what the local shops have for sale. I want us to have those conversations. I want us to go Uptown instead of Downtown, and especially I want us to steer clear of Consumption Junction. Even if it costs a bit more. Even if it is a little less shiny. Even if it means we buy less, or go to three stores to find that one thing our kid asked for. I want us to stroll down Central Avenue. And say “hi” to each other. Maybe even stop and have a surprise conversation full of more questions than answers. Maybe even ending with a hug or a long-called-for, and unexpected, handshake. I want us to be thankful for our town centers, and our backyard businesses, and see ourselves in the reflection of their holiday windows. Here’s to Main St. everywhere! Happy Holidays.
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by Laura Munson | Oct 13, 2020 | Montana
I have been an observer of humans all my life. My father used to say, “People are the same everywhere,” and I feel like my life has been a field study in seeing if I agree with him. And that means: I talk to people. The cashier at the gas station, the person on the park bench, on the airplane, in the grocery store line, taxi/Uber/Lyft drivers.
But the people I have studied possibly the most are the lone, bar belly-uppers. And I’m worried about them right now.
A little history: I’m not picky when it comes to what kind of bar. Impossible-to-reserve kitchen bars stools at 3 star Michelin restaurants, the corner Irish pub replete with Gaelic dirges, artsy holes-in-the wall where a poetry slam can happen any minute. And does. When you peel away the outer layers…I have found that people want to tell their stories. And the ones who sit alone at bars often want to do just that. They want to be seen and heard. They want to know that they’re not alone. And ultimately…people want to love and be loved. All that can happen, in a variety of doses, when humans have the courage to take their loneliness out into the world and risk a conversation with a stranger. And a bar, whether you’re there to eat or drink or connect with humanity, is a solution for loneliness that right now…can’t really happen. Again, I’m worried.
My very favorite sort of bar is the kind that doesn’t have a sign out front. Just a winking Pabst neon in a back window telling me that there are day drinkers in there who don’t want outsiders sharing the barkeep’s attention. The barkeep who loves to hear their fishing and hunting tales. Over and over again. And why wouldn’t he or she? Especially the she’s. These belly-uppers want their she-keeps all to themselves, because the she-keeps are the tougher nuts to crack…and once those she-keeps crack, those belly-uppers belong to her. They like to belong to her. To be called “Hon.” Shake-a-day, Hon? You’ve had enough, Hon. How’s the old lady, Hon? Tell her to come around one of these days, Hon.
For the almost thirty years I’ve lived in Montana, I’ve taken my father’s field study to these 11:00 am stool dwellers that still smell like last night’s whiskey, sitting in remote bars all over this state. I have an eagle eye for them from any number of rural two-lane highways that snake around Montana. When I’m sick of myself, I get in my truck and drive these roads, going right where I’ve gone left, and left where I’ve gone right, until I find that lone watering hole with that winking neon, park, and go in.
It’s pretty much the same every time: I enter and they all straighten up a bit, like they’ve just gotten a firm flick in the middle of their back from someone they’re not very fond of. Then they return to their previous position, rotate their chin toward the door, and then point it upward, slowly and just a bit, so that they’re looking at me sotto chin. It’s a practiced pose. They don’t quite land on tourist because a tourist wouldn’t come into a bar like this. But they don’t quite land on local either.
The bartender saves them from their performance and smiles directly at me as I saddle up on a stool. “What’re’we having today, Hon?”
This is the part that always throws me for a loop. Because I’m not really there to drink and so I’ve forgotten to prepare my poison. That’s the kiss of death in places like this. You have to know your poison from the time you put your car into park. You have to know your poison so that if you become a return customer, you can be given your poison without even asking. And the bartenders…they remember. So you better pick right. Because if you change it the next time you come around, and they’ve brought you what you got last time, it’s an insult to their acceptance of you in this dark den on the side of a dirt road with denizens that look like this is one of two stops on the map of their current life.
But not the map of their whole life. And it’s that map that I want to know all about. I want to see the sameness in them.
“I’ll have a beer and a shot of whiskey,” is always a safe thing to say in the way of being socially accepted in this kind of place. Hopefully they won’t notice that it’s going to take me a long time to drink it.
The people on the bar stools crack a she’s-not-half-bad smile. I love being made “good” for something that other people would find “bad”— drinking whiskey and beer, never mind before noon. What they don’t know is that I don’t like beer. And whiskey is okay. In a toddy. With local honey and Meyer lemons. And a dash of cayenne. But I’m not on that kind of stool. Those stool dwellers take a bit longer to talk if they talk at all. There’s a good chance, in fact, that they were raised not to talk to strangers. But I feel sad for them, sitting there, looking at their cell phones and adjusting their couture blouses and twisting their diamond rings. I know that deep down they want to connect the same way we all want to connect. Otherwise, they’d be sitting at a table for one. I usually give it a few tries and then let it go. Focus on my foodie haze. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a place in my heart for those stool dwellers. Especially if there’s uni involved. But I always learn more about humanity, and myself therein, when I’m in the beer and whiskey bars where the stool-dwellers think that raw fish is “bait.”
And here’s why: The winking Pabst neon nameless-bar belly-uppers might lead with hunting and fishing…but pretty quickly they’ll tell you the map of their life. And their stories. Oh their stories! Hunting and fishing themes quickly move to bleeding hearts and believe me, they’re not afraid to bleed-out on those bar stools. They have sick spouses, sick kids, sick parents. They’re out of work and not because they want to be out of work. They feel forgotten and invisible. So many of them fought in wars which they assume you know not a whole lot about, and usually they’re right. Why we fought them, or how they felt about it, and what a patriot really is. Which usually brings them to politics. And the politics in spots like this is usually vastly different from my own. But that’s part of my father’s field study.
If people are the same everywhere, why would I waste my time trying to make them wrong, or myself right.
I’m not sitting on stools trying to make anyone right or wrong. I’m sitting on stools to see myself in people’s eyes, and to hopefully have them see themselves in mine. And that means that people have to bother to look. At bars like this…they bother to look. Even if it’s under their chin. So I prefer to go to places that don’t have names. Or if they do, only the locals know what they are.
I go to cities a lot, where there are plenty of those Michelin star-type kitchen bars. But even there, I still find bars like the nameless ones in Montana with the fried pickles and every-so-often a fried Rocky Mountain “oyster.” When it comes to my field study, I trust myself better in these sorts of joints. If there’s no one there to chat with, I chat with the bartender. Get the local scoop. No one becomes a bartender to not talk to their customers. It’s part of the gig. In cities, a lot of them are artists. My people. We have a lot to complain about, but I always go for the fire in their eyes. There’s always that fire, no matter how ashen it feels. I could write a book about the things that bartenders have written on cocktail napkins for me—from a painting I must see at this one obscure little sex museum in Amsterdam, to the roseate spoonbill I must see in the sanctuary at the end of Placencia in Belize—just beware of the kids with raw chickens on fishing poles trying to bring up gaters. I trust these cocktail napkin scrawls perhaps more than the Michelin guide. And that’s saying a lot. I might not live for couture fashion, but I have a weak spot for couture food.
Here’s what I’m getting at, and you can tell I miss those stools since it took me awhile to get here:
No matter what kind of joint it is…there are no bar stools these days. And if there are, they are placed two together, six feet away from the next two, as they need to be for now. And so I’ve found that mostly…they’re empty. So I wonder where all the belly-uppers are, in couture or Carharts. I especially wonder where the single ones are. No one wants a table for one. Not if you’re there to tell stories and be heard and offer your stool-mate the same honor. Like I said, I’m worried about these people. I’m worried about the ones living alone, out of a job. The ones whose loved ones are sick and who have to isolate even more than the average person, due to susceptibility to the Corona virus. I worry about them not sharing their stories, not looking into other people’s eyes. I worry about the confessionals that aren’t flowing. The food that they’re not eating. Everyone has a jar of pickles in the refrigerator, after all.
But it’s not just the rural disenfranchised stool-dwellers I’m worrying about. I worry about the ones in gold bracelets and couture blouses at not Robuchon, not eyeing the jamon Iberico. I worry about the ones not at the corner Irish pub, not loosening their ties, releasing the smell of newspaper and Old Spice and worry. I worry about the ones in black turtlenecks who’ve taken a pilgrimage to Vesuvio to try to channel Kerouac and maybe meet another wayward poet. Not meeting anyone at all. I worry about myself. As a single woman, I rely on going into town and sitting at our local restaurant bars for dinner and connection. It’s that kind of town. And while things are open…they’re appropriately distanced. And I’m not going all the way into town to stare at a TV screen. I can’t hear anything from under masks anyway, so why bother. But Netflix stories just can’t compare with real live human ones. And a family Zoom call doesn’t really illicit what a stranger can that you’ll likely never see again.
So where are the stool-dwellers right now?
I don’t know. But I suspect they’re belly up to the internet, and if that’s the case, then maybe, oh stool-dwellers, you have found this essay. And in so doing, you have found what follows. Which is good news. Help. Stories from strangers. And just like at the bar, and the proverbial bar of life, the internet can be a friendly place too.
Here’s a more than heartening example. I hope it helps you.
The other day, in a moment of deep loneliness, the kind of moment that would have me hopping in my truck and driving until I found just the right winking neon container for loneliness and connection and stories and people-are-the-same-everywhere studies, I went on Facebook instead.
I posted this:
How are you coping right now, given all that’s going on in the world? What’s holding you together? What are you doing for personal health and self-care? How are you being good to yourself? Even if it’s something very small. My lifelines are VERY small right now and I need them that way, because they’re do-able. And I show up for them.
Walking in the woods with the dog.
Reading The Untethered Soul.
Reading a book I started writing 20 years ago.
Thinking about finishing that book and how it might end.
Writing about it in my journal.
Making dinner for one. Ratatouille seems to be the go-to.
Watching Andy Griffith when Schitt’s Creek is too much.
What are yours? Let’s get real here.
And here were what all the virtual belly-uppers shared. May it help us all.
Visual and audio pablum all the way! Back to the ‘70s.
Currently on Day 7 of a very quiet & chill 8-day camping trip.
Making myself do a 1/2 mile walk every day. Not nearly enough for weight control, but something. Reading favorite books. Baking, then giving some away when there is an opportunity. Cuddling my kitties. Talking to friends on the phone.
Talking with girlfriends about what we can control. Working on my book daily. Watching Mary Tyler Moore shows. Walks in nature
Reading, streaming, driveway visits with friends. Video chats with family.
I have become the “constant gardener” and visit my flowers at least 6 times a day. I talk to them and in my mind they are all girls! I cheer them on. I walk Tulip my little rescue Terrier mix for miles and go stare out at Lake Michigan for some peace. I sink into the abyss a lot and see no end to the isolation. I talk to a fabulous therapist every 2 weeks. I bike ride many times a week. Found TM meditation and meditate twice a day with the David Lynch Foundation – thousands on each meditation. Talk on the phone constantly…. Buy endless clothes for my new grandson who I may not see for some time as he is in SF! That is the saddest. And yes Schitt’s Creek was a life preserver but finished it. I try and hang on.
QIgong. Mimi Kuo Deemer on you tube.
Oh The Untethered Soul is one of my long time favorites – my copy is so tattered.
The Untethered Soul is profoundly transformative.
I do something physical (walk, swim, weights), something mental (work on 3 books), something spiritual (meditate)each day.
I’ve always practiced those three important balancing modules, but miss outings, vacations, and friends.
My lifelines are very small, too. Walking the dog off leash, so I can watch her prance through the grass.
Watching Northern Exposure—my husband has the box set on CD and I’ve never seen it. We watch an episode a night together.
Facetiming with my best friend.
Journaling.
Guzzling water from my giant YETI bottle.
Tinkering with my memoir.
Reading. Right now I’m finishing Everything You Ever Wanted by Jillian Lauren. It’s good.
Sunday NYT Xword with my husband. (It’s a new husband, hence the happiness?)
Looking at the sky. Sky is balm.
Exercise. Schitt’s Creek. Working with my writers. Writing a guided journal to go with the book.
Picking and canning fruit. Dog walks in the woods. Hot springs soaking. Wildcrafting medicine. Painting. Making music. Beading. Tending to my plants. Building things. Meditation.
Getting outside as much as possible. Riding one of my horses on the beautiful fall trails and hiking with the other one who can’t be ridden. Breathing in the dry fall air and driving through the lake enjoying the colors of the changing season. Cooking soups and reading by the fire. Life is good!
Yoga and meditation and walking
Making lists of “emotional self care” items for my toolbox, just like this.
Extending forgiveness to myself for being distractible, disorganized and generally undone right now.
Trying to get enough sleep. At least offering myself the opportunity for it.
Looking at photos or pulling up memories of beautiful moments in my life. Haven retreat included
Trying to balance caring for myself by eating healthy food and cari g for myself by allowing comfort food.
Untethered Soul is amazzzzing! I think I’ll re-read. Have spent the last three months supporting and safe guarding my 30yr old high-risk daughter during her LA sabbatical (Montana is body, soul and mind medicine), working to keep my staff safe and working in the Flathead Valley, and spending every minute I can in nature and with my dogs. So deeply grateful for this year’s smoke free air and endless room to roam. I’ve also been working on releasing any expectations for the months ahead, holiday happenings and all that comes with fall. Essential and gentle release like leaves falling.
Walking in the woods with the dog.
Hiking with a few friends.
Socially distanced cocktail hour.
Writing fiction.
Weak pink wine over lots of ice cubes when necessary.
Facetime with friends and my kids.
Gratitude for all I have.
Taking an online course on the Gospel of John, Facebook, reading American Harvest and Original Blessing, walking the dogs, cleaning the barn, good medication, Love Island.
Making time to write. Keeping up relationships near or far.
Reading John O’Donohue connecting to my Celtic roots watching “ Anne with an E “ again walks around duck pond with my boy Pip to listen to the birds sing so sweetly, and listening to Freya Riding and Celtic piano on repeat
I’m reading a tattered library copy of the Untethered Soul and walking in the woods! I picked up the book the other day and it fell open to page 76. I read the second paragraph and thought, woah! Chapter 8 let go now or fall! Divine Appointment
– Scheduled a telehealth conference with mental health counselor
– Sipping bourbon
– Rocking on the porch
– Birdwatching
– Reminiscing about my heavenly daughter Celeste whose birthday is Oct 6
– Grateful to live in the woods
and for my many blessings
– Creating my virtual law firm
– writing my memoir
– daily snuggles with Lola
Watching Outlander, walking through groves of golden trees, visiting Glacier NP, moving into a new place, moving towards getting my poetry published, spending time with friends
Snuggling my dog, sitting on my swing, occasional walk with a friend. That’s all I’ve got, I need more.
Ooh, I need to read Untethered Soul again.
Reading all of these responses!
Sitting outside every morning for tea and space to just breathe.
Taking my pups out in the woods. Snuggling all of our pets.
Journaling. Thinking a about art journaling (eventually I’ll get to actually art journaling, but this week at least I got so far as prepping the pages…)
Most of my time I’m staring off into space, just kind of existing. But I’m being gentle with myself and letting it be okay if that is just what my body and heart need right now
Oh, and ruminating on a new novel I want to write that feels somehow more time constrained than all the other books I’m sort of writing.
March-September
- Depression napping 4-5 hours a day.
- Doom Scrolling FB 8-10 hours a day.
October (so far)
- Listening to Mel Robbins motivational videos on YouTube.
- Deep cleaning my beach cottage one room at a time (washing walls, cleaning blinds, moving all furniture so I can scrub the wood floors on my hands and knees).
Laura, because I live with an extreme introvert, it’s a bit like empty nesting all over again. However, a few things are keeping me sane. A) Our poetry group has started up again. This time we each take a month, plan the lessons and write until the 20th of the month and then share on line. B)Working my way through the three So Now What? exercises I completed with you. The last one forced me to grieve the loss of the relationship with my daughter-in-law. (Now writing an essay from that experience.) She has been like a real daughter for over thirty years. Healing will come. I have to believe that. No, she didn’t die, but I think I’m dead to her. C) I am working on a drag-around baby quilt. I continue to edit my memoir. Should be done before Christmas. Jan. Oh, and I celebrated 79 years on this planet, too.
Aiming for meditation and yoga every morning. Being compassionate if it’s migraine and sleep instead. FaceTime with my daughter and her family (2-year-old William and her great husband Bleu). And with my sons. A weekly breakfast FaceTime with my best friend 3,000 miles away. Reading. Submitting poetry. Learning about query letters. Holding hands with the part of my that horriblizes the future, and reminding her that this really doesn’t keep it from happening the way I think it will. Loving my little one&ahalf-year-old puppy, Ruby. Offering deep smiles to stressed out strangers. Loving myself for trying so hard. Loving the world, and feeling tender and toward everyone (yes, I do mean everyone) in it for how much we all want things to be different and how scared we are to question our beliefs. And then the final go to (even for this vegan, when things are just too hard for words): Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream bars.
Enjoying coffee in bed every morning. Editing my debut novel, due Dec. 1. Freaking out about editing my novel- questioning if it’s even good. Sigh. Read “When Things Fall Apart,” again, with highlighter, journal, and sister-friend discussion group. Same with When Women Run with the Wolves. Created my first real garden. Ate what came from that backbreaking and beautiful work. Doodled a lot. Forest baths. Fell in love with my new dog. Lots of FT with daughter, 3000 miles away in LA. Lots of music. Living in tremendous gratitude. Still. My heart hurts. So. Much. Love to all.
Coffee in bed… NYTimes…. shower… paint… write short stories….roll a cigarette… watch people from balcony…Highway Patrol on YouTube after sun goes down…homesick in Spain…but I have taught the Spanish kids.. Johnny B Goode… Chuck Berry… why ? Why not ?
I alternate yoga and aerobics every other day. meditate with the CALM app every morning. try to make one friendly phone call a day. watching a lot of tennis. reading light murder mysteries that take place in france or italy so i can ‘get away’. walking outside every day even if just around the block. weeding. cooking new recipes. writing (only every once in a while).
Humanity is indeed good. But I still miss seeing you in person, bellied-up, and maybe even bleeding. We’re all in this together. Even if we’re alone.
by Laura Munson | Oct 6, 2019 | Montana
I love to wander in the woods this time of year, when the forest yields its last fruits: the river birches and aspens going gold, the mountain maples blazing red, and the larch starting to think about their green needles turning flaxen and carpeting the forest floor. After twenty-seven Montana winters, I always get this pioneer sixth sense at the start of October. Suddenly I’m scaling the forest for dead trees for firewood, making sure they’re not bird habitat. I forage for rosehips to pull off the wild rugosas to make Vitamin C-packed jelly and marmalade. I take the arnica I’ve been steeping in almond oil since spring, drain it, and cook up my salve for aching winter backs. And I try to time it just right so that I pull the tomatoes off the vine to can, before the first hard frost. Sometimes I nail it. Sometimes I don’t. Such is the dance with October.
But my favorite of all fall forest fruit is the mushroom. This time of year, in my opinion, the best edible mushroom that grows around here is the white chanterelle and I’m obsessed. But I’m also obsessed with all mushrooms, just to see how they grow in their rings, or from hard wood, or push up through the rough detritus and moss to bloom in such blithe and ephemeral glory. Something you could kick with your boot and never notice was there, but something that if you go slowly enough, and dig around, you can stop to behold– to see if it’s edible or poisonous by its gills and stems and caps. I’ve always wondered what creatures eat mushrooms, especially the poisonous ones. I wonder, and then I move on, on a hunt for my harvest.
But today…it was like the forest was playing a trick on me. A really clever trick, and yes, with mushrooms.
I went into a forest where I’ve found chanterelles this time of year. I went with dreams of sautéing them with butter and freezing them as special delicacies when winter is dark and cold and seemingly endless. Maybe I’d brown some butter and add chanterelles with the last sage from my garden for dinner tonight. I salivated as I went, looking for lodgepoles and spruce, and a good canopy and just the right forest bottom– my eye on the prize.
I saw boletes mostly. Every-so-often a meadow mushroom. But no chanterelles. So I stopped and looked around to see if I could spot a better way to go. And that’s when my mind went into contortions. I consider myself pretty observant, especially when it comes to walking in the woods, but this one had me flummoxed. Because…laid carefully in the boughs of larch and Doug fir and spruce, eye level and above…there were mushrooms. All the way up the trees. Perfectly placed mushrooms, like ornaments on a Christmas tree. The stems and caps untouched as if a forager had sliced them from the ground with a well-sharpened knife. I found myself saying what my kids say, “What even?”
My mind whipped into the mystical, as it has since childhood, especially in the woods. Were they placed there as an invitation to some underworld where beetles and ladybugs had tea with fairies and gnomes? If I touched one of them, maybe I’d be through the portal, sitting at their tiny table like Alice! Was there some system I was missing where insects loosened them and tossed them treeward for fairies to catch and place in the trees for winter food? I’m not kidding. This is where my mind goes in the woods. Don’t judge.
I almost touched one but then I stopped. I didn’t want to disturb this numinous design. My practical mind thought, Are they growing there? I looked more closely. No. They were most definitely placed there. Did a hunter do it? Why would they bother– such bigger plans? Were they dropped by raptors? Birds don’t eat mushrooms. I walked further and saw more– mushrooms in conifers everywhere. Carefully placed there and camouflaged. I’ve never seen this before in all my years of wandering in the woods. What even?
My mind went back to my childhood storybooks. Maybe I’d come across some dark magic. Wizardry. A witch who needed these exact fungi to make her brew, posing as an old crone with a walking stick in a black robe hiding behind the tree, ready to cast a spell if I didn’t move along. I started to freak myself out. I think I actually like freaking myself out, but only in this way, in the woods. I’ve been doing it all my life, but don’t ask me to watch a scary movie or read Stephen King. (unless it’s his book about writing! Brilliant!)
I shook it out of me. There must be some obvious answer. I just had to stop. And pay attention. As is the requirement of the wild if you really want to understand its lessons.
So I found a stump and sat, and I watched. Nothing but a light wind in the trees. And as I watched, I wondered: Why don’t I do this more often, sit on a stump? Why am I always walking in the woods instead of sitting in the woods? What happened to the girl who sat in the woods for hours trying to get one bird to come to me and let me touch it. It happened. A few times. When is the last time I tried to charm a bird? Or what about that girl who lay in her treehouse all day in summer, reading and writing and watching spiders spin webs? I had such a deep sense of wonder and connection then. And even more, I believed that I was not totally apart of this world, but a stranger to another that would surely welcome me with love and belonging. If only I could find that last filament of belief…I could enter a portal and be in another world. I was sure it existed. I knew that all it took was just one more Peter Pan “I believe,” and I’d be in. I always bemoaned my flaw. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t muster that one magic “I believe?”
Along the way, I stopped asking. But I never stopped believing and today was proof of it. I mean—mushrooms in trees? My mind so quick to go to magic, light or dark?
My head started to tingle and I began to lose feeling in my feet. That out-of-body feeling hasn’t happened in a while, and I took a deep breath and wiggled my toes. “Right here. Right now,” I said. That feeling scares me. Maybe it’s why I’ve never danced with beetles and gnomes… Maybe I’m too afraid for true wonder. So I sat there in shame, watching, letting my questions go and just noticing. Noticing is something I ask myself to do when I don’t know the questions to ask, and especially when I’m fairly certain I’m not going to find answers. I just allowed myself to be suspended in wonder. And that required stopping, sitting, watching, being.
My dogs didn’t seem to care one way or another. They were more interested in the squirrels running up the trees, chasing after them, causing them to chatter back from high in the boughs.
Squirrels.
As the dogs bounded into the woods, I watched closer. And I saw a stirring in the snowberry bushes. Sure enough, it was a squirrel digging up a mushroom. And I watched as it picked it up, ran it up a tree, and left it there perfectly whole on a bough, I suspected, to dry and store for winter. How fascinating. How magical. And…how not unlike…me…in the woods, with mushrooms on my mind. My stomach fluttered with wonder, only on the “this world” side of it.
Maybe we don’t need tea parties with fairies if we have this, I thought. Maybe this IS tea parties with fairies. And a surge of joy, like I felt when I was a little girl, started in my chest and spread out to my fingertips and toes. I held it there, afraid it would go, but it didn’t. It stayed. For a good long time, watching this little busy, dexterous, squirrel. As if the stump was the conduit, the keeper, and as long as I sat there, I would feel this elation and connection with the woodland kingdom. So I sat and I sat, and I watched and I watched. Until the dogs came back and chased the squirrel and the spell was suspended if not broken.
I stood, a little sad, but I smiled at the stump, memorizing it, promising to return. But then I remembered that stumps are everywhere in the woods, and where I live, the woods are everywhere. In that moment, I was moved to take a vow: All I have to do is walk into them and that magic will be there. But I won’t find it if I don’t look up, look down, go slowly, and from time to time stop altogether and find a good stump to sit on. If I find a chanterelle, that’s just a bonus. I’m looking for something much deeper than a mushroom. I’m looking for my wonder. I vow to look mostly for my wonder.
I didn’t find my beloved chanterelles. But I walked home and I went to my window seat where I keep my children’s books going back four generations. Hundreds of years of adults opening children’s already open minds to dancing with fairies in the woods. Maybe those books are really for the parents. And I pulled out a few about fairies and gnomes and witches and insects and mushrooms and the woods…and opened them and read them with tears in my eyes and a stirring in my belly. I’m really no different than that girl whose eyes gazed into these exact images with loving words spoken by my elders, while I lay in bed.
And I made myself say out loud: “I believe. I believe.” I wonder what the squirrels know.
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by Laura Munson | Aug 6, 2017 | Montana
I forgot about this essay until the smoke from the fires burning around the West put me on a kind of house arrest this week. All the windows were closed, every fan was on, and I longed for the fresh Montana air that I so love. It reminded me of a perilous fire season in the early 2000’s and I searched through my files until I found this essay. The baby in it is now a senior in high school, the five year old, a senior in college. It was in the early days of my motherhood and I felt raw and scared and protective. There were forest fires raging close to our beloved Montana home, and I was beside myself with the feeling of helplessness. I was still mostly a city transplant. I wasn’t completely resigned to what I now accept as the natural order of things in the wilderness. Thankfully, the man-made structures in our valley escaped destruction that summer. And thankfully, back here in 2017, the smoke cleared out with last night’s cool winds, the windows are open, and the air is fresh. We can all breathe deeply again. Reading this essay brings me back to a time when anything was possible, good or bad, and I was new in the field of surrender. Seventeen years later, I am glad I know that to be in the “flow” is simply to know that there is a “flow” in the first place. Enjoy!
Particulate Matter by Laura Munson This essay is dedicated to anyone who has lost their home or business to forest fire this summer. Or whose property is still in peril. It was originally published in the Mars Hill Review.
Montana is burning, again. Outside is a slur of orange and floating ash that looks like we are living on the set of a Sci-fi B-movie from the Sixties. The green grocer says it looks like a Jehovah’s Witness church marquee come true: the world is ending. The world is ending and all the Hippies are walking around wearing gas masks as if they will be the chosen race. The farmers are harvesting their alfalfa crops, lungs and all. I guess they figure they will meet their maker first. To me it looks like life inside an old sepia-toned photograph with no one smiling except the baby.
My baby doesn’t know not to smile either. He is ten weeks old—as old as the fires that burn in Lolo, Werner Peak, Moose Mountain, Big Creek near Glacier National Park and on and on. One fire burns one thousand acres and counting, just eleven miles away from our house. Another burns 14,166 acres, northwest of a town called Wisdom. I close the newspaper and hold my baby tight. Please God, don’t let our valley burn.
AM radio has political pundits spouting off against environmentalists—mad that forests have not been thinned in the name of owls and small rodents, their threatened extinction a small price to have paid in exchange for the dozens of houses that burned in last summer’s fires, and the 900 houses state-wide that wait, evacuated, their denizens on cots in high school gymnasiums. Others think it’s Conspiracy Theory—that the feds are not fighting the fire with the man-power they could in the interest of turning a profit on salvage logging in land otherwise protected as endangered habitat. Some say the firefighters are heroes. Some say they are “money-grubbing opportunists” in an impossible war. Some say that they should let the fires burn—that the only thing that will stop blazes of this magnitude is snow or days and days of heavy rain, and that the millions of dollars being spent on fire lines and air attack is not only a waste of money, but a serious threat to watersheds, and renders the forest less resilient to fire in the end. Old timers I know who have seen fires rip through this valley before just lift their eyes unto the hills and nod the way you might if Ghandi was your commencement speaker—Ghandi, the same man who said, “Suffering is the badge of the human race.” My baby sucks and rests and searches for his thumb and actually says “Goo.”
I find myself walking around the kitchen with a fly swatter, taking care of tiny black fates– things I can control. And I find refuge there. I can’t see the flames, but I see on the news that in one day the local fire– the Moose fire– has expanded from 4,700 acres to 14,000 acres, with one flame front running four miles in four hours, another cruising three-quarters of a mile in less than twelve minutes. Even if I could see the flames, my garden hose is short. I go out to my smoky garden and spend an hour watering a thirty-foot long by six-foot wide perennial bed, and two pots of tomatoes. I put my faith in my still-green tomatoes. I have to. I cannot afford to sap my faith in tomatoes with my fear of fire. They say they could rage until the October cool-down and it is only August. They say that fires this big have minds of their own.
There is skittish solace in the mundane things that need to happen whether our twenty acres of Big Sky are consumed in flames or not. The baby needs to be fed. The toilet paper roll replaced. The dishes washed. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich assembled for the five year old who will play hopscotch at summer camp today, unimpressed with the ratio of particulate matter to breathable air. I try to ignore the hot wind that bends the cat tails in the marsh behind our house that in two months has gone from canoe-able pond with mating frogs and foraging Sandhill cranes and resting loons, to a dry, cracked vestige of grasshoppers and confused snails. I try to ignore the fire bombers that drone overhead back and forth all day, driven by what I must deem as “heroes” in a war that we can only imagine.
I hold my baby and smell his head and think of all of us, living in the mundane despite the magnitude of mortality and belief and fear and faith. I think of the tiny things that weave us together that we don’t think to talk about, but that engage the moral majority of our minutes here on earth. Buttons, cups of coffee, socks and shoes. And I want to cling to these things. I want to dwell in the community of controllable things. And instead of feeling their burden, I want to find the blessing there. Not just because I am scared of fire. Not just because I look into my baby’s eyes and wonder if our future will be long together, come fire or disease or what may. But because the flames I cannot see remind me to love what I can love. Or at the very least, to take the funnel clouds they leave in their skyward wake—sometimes climbing 40,000 feet– as part of the mystery that implores me to be content with my little place on earth. My humanity. My chores. My grocery list. But the smoke…the unseen flames…must I love them too? Jim Harrison writes in his Cabin Poem: I’ve decided to make up my mind/ about nothing, to assume the water mask,/ to finish my life disguised as a creek,/ an eddy, joining at night the full,/ sweet flow, to absorb the sky,/ to swallow the heat and cold, the moon/ and the stars, to swallow myself/ in ceaseless flow.
I struggle with this flow. I struggle with my community of seens and unseens.
Outside the wind picks up; it feels gratuitous. Sinister. I drop my garden hose, short as it is, and return to the cool, stale-aired house, windows shut tight for weeks now. I pace like a caged cat, peering out the windows at the pitching and heaving lodge pole pines. Lodge poles need the high heat of forest fire in order for their cones to drop their seeds. If the lodge poles could pray, they would be praying for this exact wind. Am I to accept our destruction for the sake of lodge poles? Am I any kind of environmentalist—any kind of faithful servant of the Creator, or steward of Creation, if this is my prayer: Please God, make the wind stop? Am I to be bound only to the mundane by my faith? And accept the rest as Higher Order? The Natural Order of Things? My own fate therein? I am a twentieth century woman: isn’t there something They can do about this? Some button to push…some button to un-push?
You see, somewhere in this “flow,” I am a mother; it is my instinct to protect. I know that for me to attempt to fight the fire is fruitless. What is my fight, then? My meditation? My prayer? Can I be like Arjuna the warrior and fight, as the Hindu God Vishnu instructs, without thoughts of “fruits,” “with spirit unattached?” Can I find Vishnu’s “meditation centered inwardly and seeking no profit…fight?” Is my fight to be simply in the preservation of the tiny things that have been proven win-able in the ten digits of my human hands? Sure Job had to give it all up, but must we all? Must we at least be willing? I scrub, I brush, I boil and bake—little strokes of faith—little battles won. But I am not serene. I am not surrendered.
I struggle with surrender.
The writer Annie Dillard in her Teaching a Stone to Talk finds God in a rock. Is my Creator one who puts a rock, a lodge pole, before me? Before my children? Before this bounteous 20 acres of Montana in which we play and work and garden and grieve and pray and find home? What kind of dirty trick is this that we are to love our place on earth—nurture it with all our might, but be willing to give it all up at the same time? Wendell Berry in his Mad Farmer’s Manifesto says, “take all that you have and be poor.” I don’t want to be poor spiritually or otherwise, if it means my land—the place where my children fly kites and catch frogs, where my husband and I have conceived our children, seen our first Northern Lights, built a Mountain Bluebird nesting house that the same bluebird returns to every year and whom my daughter has named, Hello Friend—if all this is to be reduced to char.
The apostle Paul says, “…we do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” I am groaning. But I have words. I want rain. I want windlessness. I want. I want. I want. Perhaps it is this wanting that the Spirit translates to the Divine. The Buddhist tradition says that we will not experience release from our suffering as long as we have desires. So am I a complete spiritual flunky if I admit that I feel deep desire to preserve my place here on earth– that I feel an entitlement to my place? Just how much should we grin and bear? Or groan and bear? What can we pray for and remain faithful?
I realize that there are no finite answers to these questions. But it helps to know that I am not alone in them. Tell me then, Humanity, that I can pray for the wind to stop, and then after that…in my utter befuddlement, pray to the sweet and ruthless flow of Creation not only for tomatoes to grow in my pots, but for excellent tomatoes to grow in my pots! Tell me that the Creator is both Lord of wind and tiny things. And that we are not to be limited in the extent of our wants—our fears, our passion plays. Please, I beseech you, Humanity, do not tell me that I am entitled only to my sense of faith and my sense of love but not to a loved thing on earth—destined to accept the burning of my house, or say, disease in my child, as if the wind is more necessary than a child. The wind is created. The trees are created. A child is created. My house is created. Tomatoes are created. My daily schedule of car pools and play dates and meals and laundry are created. Is there a hierarchy to the importance of created things? Am I at least as dear to the Creator as a lodge pole pine? Tell me that there is a prayer for all of us. Because all of us, on some level, matter.
My five-year old daughter comes in to show me that her first tooth has come out. If I am to surrender to forest fire, tell me, oh Creator, oh Humanity, that this tooth matters. I hold the tooth in my palm and smile at her and she obliterates me with three fell swoops: “I wonder if God likes the fire. I wonder if the fire likes itself. I’m going to go outside to play now.” Maybe surrender is not a letting go, but an acceptance.
A going in, even.
Tell me then, oh time-travelers in this wondrous and heartbreaking “flow,” that not only does the mundane matter, but that it is holy. Tell me that we are in this holy pickle together—that in your ultimate helplessness on this planet, you cling to what you can help. That you too contemplate the advantages of brushing your teeth before or after coffee, almost daily. Before or after orange juice. Before or after sex. Tell me that you too keep the buttons that come in a tiny envelope, safety-pinned to your fine garments but with absolutely no intention of ever using them. Tell me that sometimes you notice that you incorporate the use of your forehead when you are folding towels. And that in that instant, you laugh out loud. Tell me that you laugh out loud. I want to know that we are both laughing. From Peoria, Illinois, to burning Montana, to Massachusetts two hundred years ago. It is the echo of that laughter which will save me at three in the morning, breast-feeding my boy, watching lighting striking, slicing through the smoky night. And prayer, I suppose. But after prayer, it is the echo of humanity, not God, I am waiting for. I want to know that I am not the only one pacing alone in my “smoky house.”
Tell me all this, and then tell me that the Creator, to whom time must certainly not be a linear stretch as it is to we mere mortal peons, must on some level restrict himself/herself/itself enough to the created hill-of-beans of my mind, and find mercy. Tell me that the execution of these tiny things are our greatest acts of faith. Because they are our fight. Our meditations. Our prayers. Prayers to the moment. Prayers to our futures. Prayers without ceasing.
Most of all, tell me that our Creator loves us for the fears we have that lead us to the clingy worship of tiny things in the first place. Tell me that you believe the Creator gives us the minutia to help us deal with the Everything Else—to find our connection to the rest of Creation. That the Creator designed us to need the community of tiny things. Tell me that the Creator invites all of it, like a parent does a child’s wants for bubble gum in one breath, and the cure for cancer in the next. And that we can both pray for the wind to stop and for the rains to come. And the fires to end. And our children’s lives to be long. And then in the next breath…the next groan…pray for plump, juicy, hose-fed, sun-kissed tomatoes every summer, smoky or not.
—2000, Laura Munson, Montana
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by Laura Munson | Jun 29, 2017 | Montana
In preparation for a writer’s lockdown for the next month, I’m reading some of my early Montana musings and learning from myself. This woman was being schooled by her need to see things from the inside out, coming into her intuition. Pour a cup of tea, take a quiet moment, and see if you remember this time in your life. Maybe it’s right now…
The naming of things. I’ve never been very good at it. Seems so formal. Restrictive.
Babies don’t enter this world with the need to name everything in it. In their estimation, the world is not made up of nouns that must be pointed at; possessed. The world is merely an extension of their little selves, still more soul than flesh. The naming of things, then, becomes a social convenience. But every baby knows that it is not a matter of survival. We forget that, I think, once we discover that our index fingers have power.
It was the Renaissance that brought me around. I was living for a year in Florence, Italy as a student of Art History. The naming of names was not just a practice reserved for museums and classrooms in that boisterous city. Florence sang with names in a full crescendo Verdi. In the dome of the Duomo…Michelangelo… Brunelleschi… the bronzed doors of the Baptistry…Ghiberti…in the cornflower and squash blossom porcelain Madonnas and cherubini in vertical rounds throughout the city…Della Robbia…in the stone walls of the countryside…Etruscans…fig picking in the hills of Chianti…Gallileo… the great Palazzo Medici keeping watch, the spirit of Dante burning for a woman in a small church, the quiet river Arno reminding the Florentines that it can rise and destroy even a Leonardo, but not his name. The names that made their city great are in the hearts and mouths of every Florentine—child, teenager, middle-aged and old; you cannot get through a dinner without being reminded of the Renaissance and the events that led up to it.
After a while, the novelty of hearing a place in fortissimo twenty-four-seven, became jaded– sinister almost. It was what I imagine the early stages of madness to sound like: a roll call in my mind’s ear– Machiavelli, Raphael, Tiziano, Donatello, Giotto, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca… A simple walk through the city became deafening: San Lorenzo, Santa Croce, Santa Trinita`, Orsanmichele, San Marco, Santa Maria Novella, Santo Spirito—with always this maniac coloratura: Michelangelo…Michelangelo. One foot into the Uffizi museum and the brain throbbed with it. Like a horror film shooting from every angle—there: the famous angel playing the lute up in a corner almost lost in the red dark velvet. There: the reds and blues of Raphael…there: the fair pinks and periwinkles of Fra Angelico…there: the structure and hulk of the Michelangelos, the red crayon of the de Vincis pulsing three dimensional on a sheet of paper. And always those eyes of the Botticelli divas.
There was no relief, no sanctuary. How could I sit in a café drinking espresso when The David was within walking distance? How many times should a girl spending a year in Florence visit the David before she really knows the David? Once a day? Twice a week. Twice a day? And what about the Slaves? Don’t forget them in their eternal half-emergence from their Carraran marble tombs. What about the unending palazzos, piazzas, chiesas, ponte? The tapestries and frescoes, the nunneries and the catacombs, and the gardens—the gardens? Every moment of looking down was a promise of missing the name that would surely be there should I look up.
But what about the tomatoes? The long stemmed artichokes and blood oranges, the walnuts and purple figs and hot chocolate so thick it hangs at the end of your spoon? What about the little forgotten churches, cold and wet, with a quartet practicing Vivaldi in the apse?
One day, I folded under the aural heft of it. I turned from the gallery of the Uffizi I had been skimming, and I ran—past Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Michelangelos’ Holy Family, Piero della Francesca’s Duke and Duchess of Urbino– past postcard vendors and character artists’ easels—past whizzing Vespas and women walking arm in arm– down to the Arno, where in a full sweat, I vomited. And I watched the voices drown in the steady slow stink until they were gone.
“You’re one of the lucky dozen,” said an old Italian man pointing at me with his cane as if he had been sent from the Renaissance to rub salt in my country’s artistic wound.
“Scusi?” I said.
“Il Stendhalismo. Stendhal’s Disease. Dizzy in the head and the stomach from all the art of Firenze. At least a dozen tourists get it every year.”
“But I live here,” I managed to say in my borderline Italian.
He smiled and shrugged and walked off as quickly as he had appeared.
I made a pact then. I would leave one museum unseen. Unheard. Its faces un-named. The other famous Florentine museum: The Bargello. I would save it. And instead, I would go slowly through the halls of the Uffizi for one year until the voices simmered to a whisper, or better, became woven into my heartbeat like a monk’s prayer.
It worked. Months later, I made my usual pass along the wall which holds the Birth of Venus, and stopped dead center. Not because I wanted to name her, but because I needed to forget a lost love– stare at something so beautiful, it would flush the hurt away. I stared into her wise eyes and her figure started to tunnel out of the painting toward me with a promise: she would clean away my heartbreak if I would not close my eyes. So I stood there, my eyes fixed on hers until they stung, museum patrons coming and going, reading the plaque beside her, saying the word Botticelli and leaving, and I stayed until there were sea-cleaned tears falling down my cheeks. Now, when I look into the eyes of the Venus on the half shell, I do not need to say Botticelli in order to believe in her perfect flaxen place in land, sea and sky.
I spent my last day in Florence making a café latte last four hours in my favorite outdoor café, around the corner from the Uffizi, one piazza away from the Bargello. I needed to return to the States with the taste of espresso in my mouth and the stink of the Arno in my nose and the perfume of squashed tomatoes fallen from street vendors, the sound of the horses’ hoofs and high-heeled shoes on the cobblestones. I did not hear Puccini or Verdi, not even in a pianissimo.
Instead, I overheard some tourists talking on the street corner, clad in money belts and brand new Nike sneakers. “Yeah, it’s been an awesome two weeks,” one said to the other similarly vested American, introducing herself. “First we did Paris, and then we did Madrid, then we did Milan, today and tomorrow we’re doing Florence, and then we’re doing Rome for a few days and flying back.”
That sealed it. I did not do Florence. I learned that year that a place cannot be done. Whether you have one minute in it, or an entire lifetime. The ultimate difference between doing a place and being in a place, I suppose, has to do with an openness, but too, the privilege of time. I will never know Florence like the Florentines do. But I understand the place past the name. And I understand that a name is just a name perhaps, until you have sat for many hours, and sipped a cup of coffee knowing it is there, around the corner. Having surrendered a lover in its midst. Trusting that it can clean you the next time you look it in the eye.
***
It took three years of living in Montana before it dawned on me that all cone-bearing trees are not called Pine trees. It took me five years of living in Montana before I could see that the structure of the distant hills was different from hill to hill. Six, before I could see what the hills were made of. Seven before I would stop and stare at a Hemlock and wonder why there were not, then, Cedars or Subalpine Fir dwelling nearby. Eight before I could tell when the Larch were just about to go as flaxen as the Botticelli Venus, before they went bare and asleep. And I got stuck there at eight for a while because I decided it was time for field guides and the naming of names—and suddenly my pack became heavy with books on wildflowers, trees, scat and track identification, and binoculars, and my walks in the woods were half spent with my nose in a topographical map. Suddenly my walks in the woods were like my early walks through the galleries of the Uffizi, with a running commentary of names: Fir, Larch, Subalpine Fir, Grand Fir, Cedar, Hemlock, Lodgepole, Ponderosa. And I was not seeing the forest anymore.
So I backed off. Lost the field guides and maps. Started riding horses and not carrying anything but a bottle of water and a piece of fruit. I cantered through the woods so that the trees were in constant blur, hoping that with my new vantage point, I might not see a Larch and think: Larch. And that brought me through to nine. My ninth year. Now. Today. When the forest started to sing.
I was sitting at a glacial lake, ten or so miles from home, not remembering that it was late September and that the ten o’clock sunsets are a thing of summer past. I had come to the woods not in the pursuit of trees, and not to forget a lost love, but to forget a potential one.
My husband announced that morning that he wanted to be scientifically done with our life “as breeders.” No more kids. I heard bits and pieces of it—one of each…enough for both sets of arms…we fit just right in a canoe…airplanes trips still affordable…college tuition possibly manageable if we start saving now…no shared bedrooms…we can take that trip back to Italy you’ve been talking about since I met you—show the kids all those paintings you love so much.
“I’m done,” he said. I heard that loud and clear. He wanted to know that I was okay with that.
So I lost light tonight at the lake, thinking about the fact that we humans have one miracle left that we can at least court, if not perform. An outward and visible sign, I think the Sunday school quote goes. Still, left up to Mystery, but perhaps, if all goes well, possible. One last stroke at genius—one last connection to the Creator. One last place of true breathlessness. Surrender.
And he wanted to cut off that line to Divinity in a matter of a few minutes in a fluorescent-lit doctor’s office, all for a small fee. “I think insurance pays for most of it,” he said.
I lost light watching the last of the bug hatches, and the fish rising and the clouds going crimson, breathing shallow little strikes at feeling okay about the last of my motherhood. No more would my belly swell with life kicking and swimming inside me like that mountain lake. I tried to force a cavalier alliance to population control. But it seemed all wrong, no matter how I tried to wrap my mind around it.
And then it didn’t matter, because it was dark. And I was far from home. And I wasn’t sure I knew my way. I’d always heard that horses did, but there were steep cliffs my horse was willing to go down in the dark that I wasn’t, and so I needed to be her guide. And I didn’t feel like I could be anyone’s guide just then.
I mounted and, loose-reined, she led me to the trail. The moon was a thin crescent—not much for lighting paths through thick stands of Fir and Larch. I turned her one way and she hesitated, ever-loyal, and I made my mind blank. Putting take me home…make my decision for me…into a parcel of intention she might be able to translate; horses are the most intuitive animals I have ever shared dark or light with. She stepped forward and I went with her into the dark woods. And I went like that for what seemed like miles and miles, not being able to see the trail, not really caring all that much, mourning my unborn children, trusting.
And then I thought about the Venus. How she asked me to stare into her, believe in her until my eyes stung with her cleansing power. I let out a sigh then. And my horse stopped. We were at an old granddaddy of a Douglas Fir that I recognized; it was the one that stood alone in the clear-cut, like some logger had just been too taken by it to cut it down. My horse was still; dormant. I looked up into its branches; they were full and architectural. Second growth. Maybe third. But statuesque and mighty in a way trees aren’t allowed to be around here much anymore.
I let my head fall back against my shoulders and sighed and let my breath rise up into its branches the way I had let the Venus pull out of her painting. And I held and it stung, only not in my eyes, but in my ears this time. And I did not say, Douglas Fir. I said, “Thank you.”
And we went then, through the next few undulations of forest until we were climbing the steep hill home. I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it for all its silence. And I could smell it, for all its running sap. Rotting stumps. Dusty bottom.
I leaned forward on my mare’s neck, holding her mane. And we crested the ridge. Then back I leaned, holding firm with my knees, letting my hips go loose in her rhythm. Hearing the scuttle of scrim and glacial tilth, grinding under-hoof. The rustling of scrubby brush and nocturnal beasts, not the sort to trust daylight at all.
On the flat ground, we cantered. I held on to her mane, breathless in the dark. And I did the reverse. I closed my eyes.
I felt it: clean.
And the forest sang us home.
To plug into your intuition through the power of words and Montana…come to a Haven Writing Retreat this Fall 2017
September 6-10
September 20-24
October 4-8 (FULL)
October 18-22
by Laura Munson | May 30, 2017 | Montana
The field of possibility…
As seen on Explore Whitefish!
June is heavenly here in Whitefish, Montana with all the birds nesting and singing their territorial symphony, the snow melting off the mountains, the rivers in full rush, the days warm, and the nights still cool. I’ve lived here for 25 years, and I know this season for the embarrassment of riches that it is! June also begins my summer Haven Writing Retreat season, so my idea of a perfect day is to ground myself in Montana’s splendor, as I prepare to welcome the 20 brave seekers who come from around the globe to be inspired, write, and find their voice through the written word, whether or not they consider themselves writers. Many of them stay and enjoy the area, including, of course, Glacier National Park and Flathead Lake, using Whitefish as their home away from home. I’ve seen Montana, and Haven, change their lives over and over again, and I love sharing the container for my muse with them! But first…a personal retreat day in paradise. Where to begin…
- An early morning ride on my old Morgan with my horse guru, Bobbi Hall of Stillwater Horse Whispers Ranch (who leads the Equine Assisted Learning at my Haven Writing Retreats), to meet our dear friend, Ky, from Great Northern Powder Guides, in the woods. Ride to Murray Lake on The Whitefish Trail, catch up as busy kindred sisters must, and listen for nesting loons. Maybe a morning dip in the lake while the horses graze.
- Go home, unsaddle, grab the kids, and forage for morels near riverbeds and in forest fire burns. (Exact location…up over Never Tell ‘Em Ridge… Same with huckleberries in August…)
- Be captivated by the little magenta heads of the Calypso orchids (Fairy Slippers) popping up through the woodland forest bottom while we picnic.
- Pick arnica blossoms to make into salve for aches and bruises from a hearty Montana lifestyle! (Combine with local Montana beeswax from Third Street Market, and give as gifts all year!)
- Drive home past the golden fields of canola in bloom.
- Hop in a kayak on Whitefish Lake and paddle, or if I want wind in my hair, rent a ski boat or pontoon boat at the marina at the Lodge at Whitefish Lake. Celebrate the fact that The Whitefish Trail is now almost a full loop around the lake—a dream that came true! Nice job, Whitefish Legacy Partners! (Click here to help close the loop!)
- Stop by the Farmer’s Market and see the spirit of the town in full bloom, with fabulous food trucks, like INDAH Sushi (restaurant opening in Whitefish soon!!! One of the owners, Stacey, is a Haven Writing Retreat alum!) Listen to live local musicians, and pick up veggies and herbs from local farms, like Purple Frog Gardens, and Terrapin Farms. Pick up some Morning Buns from the Finn Biscuit! Wander through all the great vending booths. Remember why I love this town and its people so much.
- Stop by Tupelo Grill for a craft cocktail (the Sazerac and Now or Never are my favs), and their sinful bacon-wrapped chevre dates.
- Be overwhelmed by all of the amazing restaurant choices there are in Whitefish, realize I’m filthy from the day’s activities, and instead…
- Go home to grill Montana steaks and (hopefully) sautéed morels for dinner on the patio with old friends and family. Sip on Domaine Tempier rose, inspired by years of reading my favorite, and longtime Montanan, writer, Jim Harrison. (I hope there’s DT wherever you are, Jim!)
- Relax at dusk and listen to the birds singing their nighttime Taps, with members of the Flathead Audubon society on my screened porch, telling me who’s who in this magnificent symphony.
- End the day journaling about this incredible place on earth in preparation to welcome the next group of brave seekers who are giving themselves the gift of a Haven Writing Retreat at the beautiful Walking Lightly Ranch!
- Drift off to sleep, watching an endless sky of meteor showers from my bedroom window.
- Dream of tomorrow: a hike in Glacier National Park, ending at the Northern Lights Saloon up in Polebridge for dinner and chats with fellow wanderers, proud to call myself a Montanan!
Montana= Heaven’s Haven on Earth. Enjoy!
For more information about my writing and Haven Writing Retreats, or to sign up for my blog and newsletter, click here!
Now booking our September and October Haven Writing Retreats in Whitefish, Montana:
June 7-11 (FULL)
June 21-25 (1 spot left)
September 6-10
September 20-24
October 18-22
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