The thrumming of a car over patchwork roads
sings a melody of welcome home more sweetly
than the crooning country coming across the radio.
This is the place of open sky, cradled by windswept peaks
capped in glittering white in winter months, to the delight
of skiers and snowshoers who traverse their slopes
until the bursting green of spring’s sudden thaw,
when wildflowers adorn the mountain meadows all around.
Where amber pastureland studded with simple farmhouses,
or trailer homes dusty from their gravel drives,
like pebbles taken from the Missouri and set in place
as checkers on a board of gold and emerald,
wraps around our town.
Here, a daily commute becomes communion
with placid lakes, crystalline streams, and the ever-changing clouds,
where azure yields to rolling storms and thunderous awe in summer,
or falls to a frigid hush as autumn chills the air.
It is a lake of golden lights too few at night
to truly dim the panoply of glimmering constellations,
surrounded on all sides by shores of shadows,
where no illumination save occasional headlights pierces forest highways.
Here, wilderness intersects with slow-growing progress,
from city deer to barn owls to coyotes who dare to run
along grey fencelines despite old neighbor ladies
who would gladly discourage them with a rifle,
to protect curious cattle kept off the interstate
by the guards that rattle beneath truck tires.
Small town coffee-shops offer community so easily,
at least until the sidewalks all but roll up at seven,
when we sleepy-eyed night owls cluster around
our formica tables at Shellie’s Cafe,
open so mercifully for all twenty-four hours of the day.
Restaurants serve as little hubs for neighbors and friends
to reconnect in all those taken-for-granted ways.
It doesn’t matter if the staff know your name,
since they’ll smile and ask with a pop quiz about your day.
A comfortable contradiction exists in different grandeurs
visible on the shaded streets charitably called “downtown”,
where sometimes heavy rains remind once it was
a simple gold miner’s running, last-chance gulch.
First and foremost, the sun-drenched spires
of red tiles and sweetly tolling bells topping
soaring St. Helena’s Cathedral,
its interior all in white marble with a golden sacristy
and breathtaking stained glass windows worthy
of some medieval kingly patron, so detailed
their expressions seem alive, caught in reverence,
and their halos beaten gold that gleams holy
in the hushed candelight of Good Friday Mass,
or reflect triumphant in the resounding song
of the pipe organ playing Handel’s Messiah.
Then the Capital Rotunda in neo-classical style,
topped by the figure of Montana, her arm upraised,
one of the many reminders of beauty kept there.
Within, adorning the walls, are grand displays
of those who built this beloved place:
Native peoples, explorers and trappers, miners and cowboys.
Not far is the minaret of the Civic Center
built by the Shriners in an almost Andalusian style,
home to the Symphony and Fire Department alike,
with endless activities beside where the farmer’s market
and Alive at Five celebrate the fleeting summer.
Too, from downtown, one can see the brickwork,
more than a century old, of Carroll College—
but also the aged wooden Firetower which stands
an unceasing watch over the Gulch from its overlook,
vigilant on Mount Helena’s verdant, craggy slopes:
a peak, like the Sleeping Giant, visible from all the valley.
If one takes the time to wander down the brick paths
of Reeder’s Alley, still preserved for a century and a half
by the people who love it so,
down into the Walking Mall with its statues,
almost spontaneous murals and chalk art,
one comes to find an intersection between
weathered past and vibrantly hopeful future.
It is visible in children playing chess with giant pieces
outside the storefront for Martin’s Wines,
in a library that has leaned into difficult times,
and further down, in a rainbow-fronted bookstore
where signs promise you, whoever you are,
are loved for the difference that you are.
It is visible in the Holter Museum, where local art
is displayed for a donation box, not a fee—
where Our Place, for those struggling with addiction’s demons,
and God’s Love offers shelter to those without,
while the Food Share eases the pain of deprivation
hand in hand with community gardens—
all these offer little breaths of hope.
There are many patchwork imperfections here,
in the streets which sometimes make no sense
and the people who close themselves off to others,
and the cracks that swallow souls so easily,
when what they needed was a gentle catch.
But even in those moments of opinionated quarrel
or heartwrenching privation and pain,
one remembers the thrumming melody
sung by a car over many a patched pothole
and the rhythmic rattling of driving back dirt roads.
In a place where opposites meet,
wilderness butting up against settled spaces
or beauty flourishing beside broken things,
there are bound to be cracks and gaps.
What I have found here, what I hope flourishes
in every place a human could call home,
is the desire and willingness to mend.
I remember my hometown for its hiking trails,
its simple pleasures, its brewhouses and cafes,
its new beginnings for so many,
its living, breathing memories,
but most of all for its people, the menders,
who have so often been Kindness itself.
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