Chester, Montana: Odyssey on Highway 2

I wrote this stream-of-consciousness post nearly a month ago as my odyssey began.

I am here to clear out my mother's apartment in her duplex. After nearly three years of trying, I have sold it. In going through my mother's things, accumulated over 95 years of living, I see my life and my brother's play across landscapes and dreams of the lives our parents bred us to embrace. Part of me wants to be unsentimental and to dispense with the things left in Mom's apartment quickly and rationally. A whole other part of me wants to stop time and hold every single object and feel its familial weight before letting it go to the pile for the church rummage sale or in the box going to the neice who doesn't really want another English china tea cup. One of my friends is enthused about getting something from my mother's last effects. I bless her because she affirms my mother's life, therefore my own. Another of my nieces wants the workhorse Singer sewing machine my mother patched our clothes on and I tried to learn how to sew on and my heart cries so gladly for her wanting it.

A life's things are no less for being mere objects if they infuse memories with love and respect. I have begun an art project inspired by a full page display in The New  York Times last Mother's Day called "Mom's Genes." I am photographing my mother's iconic and oh-so-fashionable-back-then clothes on a manikin that belonged to my mother-in-law who recently died. Before I consign my mother's beautiful clothes to the Methodist Church rummage sale, I'm photographing them to remember the great taste she had and the panache with which she wore her clothes in this small Montana town where the streets were not paved until the 60s when my father briefly became mayor.

Now I'm back, contemplating a lifetime of lessons from my parents in this town that loves its young without reservation and still claims them, like me, when they're getting on in years even if they don't vote Republican. 

On this moonlit night, the trains whistle every hour or 40 minutes: wheat and some coal to west coast ports. Oil from the Bakken. Amtrak passengers get sidetracked when commodity loads thunder by. Once I stood on our wood pile in the backyard with my friend Donise and waved frantically at an eastbound train which she convinced me carried Elvis Presley. The world here is huge in imagination. Reality is, I need to clear out my mother's house and all of the treasures I hold in my hands will be but oddities in others' arms. 

Journey 2 Another Walled Roman Town -- Chester, England!

San Michele in Foro in Lucca, Italy
Do you see the Archangel on the very top?
Pisan style, multicolored marble, exquisite

That's right! About a year ago, I was in Lucca, Italy where I daily perambulated the beautiful wall that encloses that delightful Tuscan city. Now I'm on my way to Chester in Cheshire which is also encircled and whose wall is even older than Lucca's which wasn't started until the 1500s.

Although Chester, Montana (no wall!) was probably named for Chester, Pennsylvannia, the American "Chesters" must have been inspired by the ancient English town. The Romans' settlement in England, dating from the 1st century AD,  was called Deva, a fort next to the Dee River from which they deployed their largest permanent legion. There is still a section of Roman masonry in Chester's wall and the outline follows the Roman's outer fort for much of its length. 

What a treat to be able to compare two walled cities to which I am tied by blood, birth, and circumstance. The circularity of my journey from Chester to Lucca to Chester strikes me as an inevitable consequence in my longing to find my way back home. I have many homes, as it turns out. I've just begun to discover them all!

While I make my way to  England, I will gaze at beautiful Lucca, Italy and long for her wall. May Chester's be as mighty and as beautiful. 

Lucca's wall and lush green meadow on its outside

The top of the wall where everyone goes to see and be seen

Lucca's wall, the perfect place for an evening passeggiata