On my mother's side, we go back six generations. Some of the first settlers in NW Montana. My grandfather helped build the Hungry Horse dam and once won the title of best lumberjack in the state. He was also a wheat farmer and kept a milk cow to help feed his kids. Grandma had a big vegetable garden, probably half an acre, and when we went to the farm for a visit, we were treated to things like new peas and spring onions in a cream sauce made from cream from the cow. Nothing better in the world. And homemade bread made from the wheat from the farm.
Two wood burning stoves were used for heating the farmhouse and also worked for cooking when big meals were being prepared. Grandma grew up cooking and baking in a wood stove so she knew just how much wood to put in to bake bread in that oven.
When my cousins and I got too loud in the farmhouse, we'd be sent out to play. In the winter, we played with sleds, ice-skated on the frozen ponds on the farm, built snow forts and threw snowballs. When we'd decide to come back in and warm up, we'd have to bang on the door to be let back in because our hands were numb from the cold and we couldn't work the doorknob.
In the summer, we'd help weed the garden, pick the vegetables for dinner, shell the peas. We'd walk through the fields to the old farmer's dump about a mile or so away, and look through a big pile of rusted barbed wire and broken glass for treasures like an old bottle with the cork still in it, turning colors from age. We were just six years old and now it would be unthinkable to let kids go to a place like that alone unsupervised, or to get anywhere near broken glass and barbed wire, but that's how things were in Montana at that time, we were given a whole lot of freedom and somehow we managed to live and thrive anyway.
Sometimes we'd go to a friends cabin on Flathead lake. It's a glacier-fed lake and only children and drunken fools swim in it. We'd wade in, shocked from the cold, and just when we'd get numb enough to be comfortable in the water, one of our parents would look out from the deck where they'd be talking and drinking beer, to say, "you kids have to come in now, your lips are blue." "Awww, Mom....we just got comfortable!"
Near sunset, the adults would stop talking and everyone would look at the beauty of the sunset against the snow-capped mountains. We kids stopped playing and looked too, learning to love the beauty of the land like our parents did. At night we'd snuggle in our sleeping bags on the deck and look up at the millions of stars and listen to the coyotes howl in the distance. If there was a breeze, we might smell the wild honeysuckle.
It was only as a grownup that I came to appreciate that the experiences I had, the memories I still have, are more precious than gold. That not everyone grew up the way my cousins and I did. I didn't always live in Montana, as we were military, but I spent enough time there to be able to call it home. I no longer live there, and shake my head at the politics there sometimes, but no other place will ever be home for me.
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