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Heirlooms West
Late last summer, following a tedious series of squabbles, my wife and her siblings proceeded to divide up the material goods of her mother’s estate. Among the items we inherited were a rare three-legged buffalo nickel, a pristine Morris chair, a Civil War era Starr percussion carbine and an oil painting by Caroline’s grandfather, a […]
I was anti-vaxx before anti-vaxx was cool.
In April, 1955, I sat in the back row of fifth-grade homeroom in Flint, Michigan and watched my classmates march to the front, roll up their sleeves and get ready for their shot. The Salk vaccine had been a long time coming. The year before, polio reached epidemic proportions in the US when case counts […]
The log cabin syndrome
We thought we’d start our Labor Day getaway with a trip to Lewistown and a visit to the Bear Gulch pictographic site. Montana COVID numbers were low in August, so it took a while to process the discovery that site would nevertheless be closed; that viewing centuries-old Native American art at an outdoor site, 20 […]
Can $949K buy a piece of the true Montana?
On June 12, 2021, excavation for the 48-unit condominium complex next door is going full tilt. On a site the size of a city block, a 345 John Deere excavator feeds the hungry line of side dump trailers, queued up the block below us on Fourth Street, just down the hill in Missoula. The loader […]