The Yellow and White House

Last night, my own dreams betrayed me.

A yellow and white house fell from the sky and crashed to the ground very near me.  Inside the house, two small children perished.

I did not ask why a yellow and white house fell from clear skies.  Of course that makes no sense.  I asked, instead, why small children should suffer or die.

What sense in that?

I woke immediately from my dream of the children, of weeping parents.  I woke to the bruised darkness of my own house—to such profound sadness.  Awake, I felt the sorrow as certainly as I felt the bedsheet and blankets on my chest.

What hidden monster inside me smashed that yellow and white house against the earth and killed those children?

-- Mitchell Hegman                                          

Far and Away

The authority having jurisdiction and I drove to Missoula yesterday afternoon and took a room downtown near where I am teaching a class today.

Leaving Helena and ascending MacDonald Pass, we encountered quite a rise in temperature.  At the bottom of the pass our fancy automobile registered 17°F.   Within about three miles of climbing we had reached a temperature of 38°F.  The temperature dropped again when we slipped down into the snowy valley on the far side.  For the next 100 miles we experienced 24°F and sketchy roads that alternated between wet, dry, snowpack, and slushy. 

The hotel in which we are staying has recently been remodeled.  The mirror in the bathroom “floats” off the wall and provides light from a translucent border around the edge.  I thought it worthy of an abstract image.  I captured just such a photograph and have posted it today.  For some reason, I thought I should call the photograph “Far and Away.”

-- Mitchell Hegman    

A Traffic Jam of Unusual Nature

There is no polite way to say this.  The streets in Helena and most of the highways leading into Helena are awful.  They range from sheer ice cover to rippled snowpack.  Traffic flow, in general, has slowed greatly.  Intersections take longer to clear when lights change.

Yesterday, while driving out of town on Eleventh Avenue, I came upon a traffic jam of unusual nature.  While the lane of traffic in which I was driving flowed in a fairly normal fashion, the other lane was filled with a very long string of cars and trucks moving along at a crawl.  My line of cars quickly overtook the slower, tightly spaced line.  When I finally reached the apparent front of the slower line, I saw a man riding a tiny motorized scooter of some type.  The man was dawdling along at perhaps four miles-per-hour.  He was wearing a reflective high visibility vest and had a traffic warning triangle affixed to a three-foot post attached to the back of the scooter.

He was holding his place—right there in the middle of the lane—carefully creeping along in single digit temperatures at a single digit speed.

Later in the day, I bumped into a friend of mine at Costco.  We exited the store into the parking lot at the same time. I had taken no more than three steps before he nudged my shoulder and pointed immediately across the traffic lane in front of the store.  “See that scooter over there?”

Upon glancing in that direction, I saw, parked at the edge of string of cars, the very scooter I had seen earlier in the day.  I laughed.  “I saw a guy driving it earlier today.”

“I did too!”

“Was he causing a traffic jam?” I asked.

“Yes!  He is really brave…or something else.”

-- Mitchell Hegman                                                        

Not of a Feather

Sometimes birds not of a feather stick together.

I recently wrote about seeing a flock of LBJ birds (little brown jobs).  Yesterday morning, I pitched a few unsalted seeds and nuts and a few scraps of salad fixings out atop a drift of snow for the local magpies.  Magpies are flamboyant and easy to identify.  When about a dozen magpies flew to take turns feasting on what I had offered, however, they were joined by a single RBB (really big bird).  I snapped a picture for anyone capable of identifying this species of bird.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Winter Tide

For the last two nights the moon and the snow have conspired against me.

The moon has pulled on me as if were an ocean tide.  I tried clawing my way to the center of my bed to resist.  I tried holding myself there by the bottom bedsheet, but the moon gradually dragged me back to the edge. 

And the light!

My bedroom has filled with slants of pewter light—knife blades of light slicing through the blinds.  Blue shadows extended at odd angles from lamps, dressers, and the bed itself.

The moon drew me to windows, one after another, to the windows.

Outside, the entire landscape of snow glowed, sparkled.  The immediate prairie, the nearby hills, the far mountain range, the sky above: everything colored entirely by the same silver brush.

How could I sleep with the moon so insistent and the prairie and mountains I love lighted as if from within?

-- Mitchell Hegman

New Year’s Resolutions, 2018

Last year, I set forth with five resolutions for 2017.  For the sake of being nice to me, I think we should not discuss those.  But I like the idea of hurtling into each new year with five firm resolutions in hand.   Here is what I have for 2018: 

1.     I am going to be more situationally aware and avoid saying the wrong thing at the wrong time—like that time I asked a blind person if she had to “keep an eye” on her service dog in large crowds.

2.     This year, I will ignore my (not necessarily) smarter-than-me-phone traffic app notifications while I am home.  I already know I can expect ‘light traffic’ in my area.  I have one permanent neighbor on the spur road beyond me and the first place I pass on the main road is a mile in either direction.

3.     I will stop petting my 20 pounds of housecat against the grain of his coat and stop messing his hair (which really annoys him).  Okay, stop might be too strong a word here.  Let’s go with something in-between ‘stop’ and ‘continue.’

4.     I will try to keep the dust off my treadmill with my feet instead of a Swiffer.

5.     I promise to not shoot from the potato gun all the avocados and Cuties (mandarin oranges) the authority having jurisdiction bought for herself when Kevin and I run out of potatoes for ammo.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Torchlight Parade

Late yesterday afternoon, the authority having jurisdiction and I, along with our friends Kim and Bill, drove to Great Divide Ski Area for our New Year’s celebrations.  We arrived at the ski hill just as the sun eased down against the snow-tented Rocky Mountains to our west.  The temperature was 12°F upon our arrival.  The girls settled into a table in the lodge while Bill and I purchased lift tickets and rode the chairlift up into the high mountain twilight.

Every time I go skiing I remember how much I love it.

Bill and I made three swishing runs off the Good Luck chair as the sky dimmed into a soft pink.  By the end of the last run, the sky had dissolved into cobalt blue and the moon had untangled itself from clouds to our east.

After skiing, we joined the girls inside the lodge.

The evening ended with a torchlight parade of skiers slowly twisting down Power Dive ski run.  That was followed by a fireworks display against the snowy mountainscape.

I have posted a couple photographs and a video I captured with my smarter-than-me-phone.

Happy New Year to all!

-- Mitchell Hegman