Wintry Quiet Things 1 - Missoula, Montana

"...We are quiet now

The deeds we’ve rendered to this day

Are like small seeds in the ground

Eventually they’ll have their say..."

- from Quiet by Janet Martin

Stop by Another Porch...A Poetry Blog for more lovely verse - perfect with your daily cuppa!

Gummy Yummy - Missoula, Montana (by way of Korea)

Delightful colleague S. gifted to me this yummy Skinfood Gummy Bear Dark  Chocolate Hand Butter - with ingredients in Korean to prevent me from thinking about it too much to just enjoy the gift.

But I do, enjoy the gift, I mean. It's not only adorable but also smells sooo good!  

I'm thinking of taking up sucking my thumb again.

Grey Transformed - Rattlesnake Creek, Missoula, Montana

"But soon, he knew. It would come soon enough. And the gray November would be transformed into a bright sparkling wonderland of skiing and skating. Of snowball fights, and snow forts and snowmen, and angels made in snow that had fallen from the heavens."

- from A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny, page 2

Cycling Luck - Missoula, Montana

"I thought of Virgil's words: Luck most often is accompanied with knowing what you are doing."

- from Iron Horse, Ch. 29, by Robert Knott

Bone Cold - Clark Fork River, Missoula, Montana

"A damp wind was sweeping across the flatlands, carrying moisture from melting snow and ice, for hundreds of miles, and depositing it in their bones."

- from A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny, page 96

Oranges - Missoula, Montana

"... I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands."

- from Oranges by Gary Soto 

Sky Post-Sorrow - Clark Fork River, Missoula, Montana

"If it were possible to render sorrow, it would look like a November gale.

But, then like sorrow, it too passed and the new day arrived almost impossibly clear and bright, the sky a perfect blue."

- from A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny, page 14


Tucked away as they are, the villagers in Louise Penny's fictional Three Pines community probably are not burdened with rampant power lines cluttering their views. But then, neither do they enjoy the compensation of Montana's ever-splendid sky. (And not just because they are, after all, fictional characters, natch!)

Highway Thoughts - Near Missoula, Montana

"Highway 287 ran through open spaces luminous in the sunshine.  
A sense of peace pervaded the plains, Vicky thought. 
The way the land dissolved into the sky always called her back to herself. She was different here...part of something larger than herself, part of the stories that had shaped her life...Time collapsed into the present...a circle encompassing the past and the future, not like the ribbon of asphalt shooting straight into the horizon."

 - from The Drowning Man by Margaret Coel, page 99