Bright Whites - Missoula, Montana

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." - E. B. White (1899-1985)

Springtime In The Rockies - Above Butte, Montana

"You know you can't sing and be mean at the same time." - Gene Autry in "Springtime In The Rockies" 1937)

Lock View - Missoula, Montana

"Needing was so easy: it came naturally, like breathing. Being needed by someone else, though, that was the hard part. But as with giving help and accepting it, we had to do both to be made complete- like links overlapping to form a chain, or a lock finding the right key." - Ruby (pgs 400-401)” - Sarah Dessen ,'Lock and Key'

Spring Colours - Missoula, Montana

Conventional wisdom of our childhood: Don't talk to strangers. (To which I've been known to retort, 'It doesn't get much stranger than this! Chortle chortle!' Parents are rarely  amused. ) 

But once we're past the naive vulnerability of childhood, it behooves us to glance beyond our busy blinders or societal comfort zone and speak to strangers - a simple smiling hello as you pass on the sidewalk, or a conversational weather comment to your checkout line neighbor.

Call me simplistic, but I t's often the simplest, seemingly small things that make all the difference in our day - positive or negative - and the unknown person next to us is not so very different from you or me. 

A stranger's kindness was offered to me during my Sunday river walk by way of a handful of spring blossoms along with the request, "Just squeeze this, then smell it - and look at the colours. People don't see the colour all around them."  An unconventional yet lovely reminder, well worth the interruption of my best laid plans. 

May your day be disrupted by unexpected loveliness, and may you be an accessory to more of the same.

Rain Sans Cats - Missoula, Montana

“I 

think that the
world should be full of cats 

and full of rain, that's all, 

just
cats and
rain, rain and cats, very nice, good
night.” 
― Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories

Wilderness Near - West of Livingston, Montana

"The beauty and charm of the wilderness are his for the asking, for the edges of the wilderness lie close beside the beaten roads of the present travel." - Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)