High Quality Life, Low Quality Pics

Summer in Montana. Put it in your bucket list.

I've been feeling pretty great these days. I keep texting photos like this to my sister and she types back: "You are so loving your life right now.". She's right. And I know probably %80 percent of that is due to summer in Montana. You know when, like in a fourth grade history lesson, or a night when you're tripping out, you try to imagine what earth was like before people? Or maybe the covered wagon era? The image that always came to my mind during those moments is what, as I found later, Montana is like in the summer. 

Fat blue skies with clouds like ships sailing past. Big green valleys. Purple mountains. Clear happy rivers.

This shit is unreal.

Within the neighborhoods it's downright Mayberry. Sprinklers, ch, ch, ch-ing. Green lawns that smell super grassy. Empty streets. Long evenings. Elderly people in shorts. 

 

I also had a perfect birthday. I made seven potent wishes by throwing rocks in my beloved river. These wishes, man I tell you, they had thirty-seven years of clarity in them. Plop, plop, plop, plop, plop, plop, plop. Grin.

Also, with the first glance down at my feet, in a spot I've stood one thousand times before, found this:

There are heartrocks and then there are heartrocks. This one is perfect on both sides. Happy Birthday to me.

Romy made me a cake. It was chocolate with chocolate chips, an apricot/peach filling, and dulce de leche frosting. YES. After we celebrated she piled a huge chunk into a giganto tub for me to take home and I ate some that night, even though I was full, because it was so good and it was my birthday.

For dinner Nathan, Echo and I biked downtown to the sushi restaurant. We ordered wine and huge platters of sashimi. Echo drew love notes to nature and ate whatever fish I put on her plate. That girl ate probably ten different types of fish, octopus, and roe. And the Universe was really smiling on me because it just so happened to be First Friday - the monthly art walk where people mill about stopping at galleries to view art, drink wine, and snag snacks, AND the windows of our restaurant were mirrored on the outside. Let me just tell you what this means: a parade of folks in their going-out wear traipsing past our window and touching up their hair, lighting cigarettes, and kissing. Serious people watching heaven.

Then Saturday night I randomly checked Craigslist and saw that a local family needed help putting together a birthday celebration for their niece whose mom is sick and dad is absent. I just so happened to have a few sets of party favors leftover from Echo's birthday party. I stifled my shyness and gave the listing a call. As it turns out they were just then at a park mere blocks from our house slicing the birthday cake. I ripped off my pjs, flung on a skirt and tore over there on my bike. Within minutes I had delivered goodies to happy children and swelled my heart.

    

But that's not all! Quality life, I tell you.

    

On the way home I found an injured crow. I raced home and roused Echo and Nathan from the bedtime Harry Potter reading. We felt like a family version of a superhero squad biking toward that bird. Echo was out of her mind with the awesomeness of it all. It was tricky but we finally cornered the poor thing in the alley and threw our best fort-making sheet over the top of her. We wrapped her up and Nathan carried her home in our grocery tote bag. 

    

By the morning we had researched all we possible could (hello homeschooling!) and soon had that poor baby bandaged up. She abides in our chicken run (sans chickens) and to our utter animal-loving delight needs us to hand-feed her canned catfood and water every three hours. She is docile and sweet and we hope, hope, hope that when we release her in a couple weeks she might just want to visit us now and then.

    

When we gathered her from the alley she clung mightily to a hollyhock stalk, so mightily in fact that to bring her along we had to uproot that stalk and bundle it along with her. So introducing...

    

Hollyhock.

    

    

xo

Comments

[Dave S. Miles]

I like the heart rock find.

[6512 and growing]

I LOVE Hollyhock! I LOVE your new fancy blog! I LOVE 7 birthday wishes! I LOVE Montana summer vibes! And you!

[Jessi Crago]

I like Hollyhock! :) Way to be animal heroes and rescuers! :)

[Carrie]

What a great bday.
Such similarities--just rescued a robin myself--and my oh my the feeling in my heart to take care of this sweet bird has to be a highlight in my life.
Sending love to hollyhock and to yiur sweet family
Blessings

[Carrie]

And the family with the bday celebration --Craigslist--
My heart is overflowing

[Melissa]

I echo your sister - it *definitely* sounds like "You are so loving your life right now." :)

[Natalie Christensen]

I was hoping you'd see that photo somehow!

[Natalie Christensen]

Hand-feeding and helping a baby wild thing - it's got to be one of the best things in life. In my next incarnation I'm going full time with the animal rescue :)