The Choice

I once left Montana because out there, in cities with tall buildings, rock bands roved freely, girls stood planted on white beaches like a forest of rouge trees, cars flowed along in great twining rivers, and the nights came alive with neon, and sometimes with gangs.  Once, while living in a finely polished city, I recalled another place, a promontory lurching into Montana’s widest and wildest sky, a childhood place where, at an elevation of eight-thousand feet, I knocked free a slab of stone embedded with dozens seashells and other ancient twisted things, and I held the stone out, and below it, four-thousand feet lower and a dozen mile across a valley floor, I saw my little town, smaller in the distance than the biggest shell in the stone.

The ancient and the new.

At nineteen I left that place.  At nineteen I returned.

I was nineteen and a little afraid of my own mortality when I lived in the city, when I very first considered the matter of what living really meant for me.  We all have our choices.  Our choice of place, of where we desire to live out our lives, might be most critical of all.  I made my choice then.  Have you really made yours?

-- Mitchell Hegman