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.