Winter Driving - Missoula, Montana

There is a man in line at the grocery store sporting shorts - as outerwear. 

(Well, I guess it could be more weird...)

I don’t know how HE arrived here, but my route from work was through a dark sleety evening, commencing in a hasty stroll across a parking lot simultaneously accumulating snow and ice. 

Now, you will see shorts throughout winter in Montana, usually of the sturdy canvas-cargo variety. But these are not those. They are not even long, saggy I-don’t-know-what shorts that on a woman in summer would be classified as capris. (Or in the 1970s as culottes – oh the joy of fashion!)  Rather, these are flappy nylon athletic shorts revealing his kneecaps (and, of course, lower legs that typically accompany such). 

And these are not even dark hairy legs that might ostensibly keep toasty in a blizzard. No, they are the skinny pale sort that look cold in a desert. I’m guessing he is favoured with an overreaching metabolism that renders him impervious to sleet gusting sideways. Or maybe he craves the adrenaline of a mad skidding dash between warm car to heated public building. Or maybe - & this is an actual possibility in Missoula – just maybe, he cut to the chase and rode his bike to the store!  

It does take all sorts to keep the world interesting - and the candy aisle. 

So, I applaud your fortitude, Mr. Shorts Man. And I decline to entertain the prosaic possibility that you just popped in for one thing on your way home from a basketball league game, and were un-phased at being briefly out in the weather between the heated gym and heated car and heated store.

Looking Beyond The Window - Lolo, Montana

"A German theologian once said that any number of things can serve as a window to God, to what he called 'the ultimate.' 

Humans, of ccourse, tend to be pane worshipers; we just stare at the window instead of the view. 

But anything that lets you look beyond the window to the divine—a kind act, a surprise, a coincidence—is a way of communicating with something bigger than we are."

 — Kate Braestrup, Minister and Author of Beginner's Grace 

Winter Driving, Missoula, Montana

Bundled up as I was - in big boots and toque - for an evening stroll, I was astonished at how many bicycles were parked downtown in Missoula. Even after this weekend’s prolific snowfall, I saw cycling commuters in this morning’s traffic. Brave or desperate, one can only hope a good story is behind such a transport decision, particularly as we actually have a public transit system.