This is where we left Dad's ashes, on a bluff just above where he'd been born, in a cabin beside a weeping willow tree across from the Stillwater River near Columbus, Montana. A fitting place of rest: wildflowers, native grasses, ponderosa pines, silence.
It had stormed the night before. My sister and I drove through lightning-lit pitch blackness, impenetrable sheets of rain, and four inches of standing water in the middle of a super-cell on I-90 to get to our Grandmother's funeral. We started in Butte. It took us hours to get to Columbus just from Big Timber, a journey that should have taken about a half-hour. Harrowing, white-knuckle, driving-at-20-mph, and then dawn, over a fresh landscape, scrubbed and sparkling.
And there, after the graveside ceremony with all its trappings for our Gramma, we took Dad to the Stillwater.
This shot was taken with a Pentax K-1000 back in 90-something. That was a great old camera. I now use a Nikon D-40 SLR. I don't miss the film as much as I thought I would, but I'm looking forward to making my first pinhole camera, exposing film that is probably 20 years old. We'll see...

Living without a camera has been interesting and frustrating. I broke my wide-angle lens after we got back from Scotland by sticking my finger into it (don't ask). My other lens is a telephoto zoom and you can't get nearer than six feet to take a picture close up, and distance pictures are, of course, telephotoized. Plus, there's annoying dust inside the camera body that blotched every Scottish picture I took.

So, until I have the cash to buy a new lens and get the camera cleaned--which may be never--I'll have to resort to posting old stuff on here. That's good, because I have plenty of it!

Meanwhile, my characters continue to surprise me by acting out of character. That's what they do. It's fun. They're making me rewrite my story! The main character, of course, is Montana.


And the river dreamed...