here comes emptiness, crashin' in...

today was a good day for a nap. and maybe a change of heart.

yesterday our oven was baking all day. we cooked bread from scratch, without a machine. i cannot believe that these are the first two loaves of yeast bread that i have ever made in my entire life. like tortillas. these are basic staples of my idet that i buy in a package at the store, completely removed from understanding the process of making. totally ignorant: how does one knead dough? how long does one let the dough rise? how do you do this thing without an electric mixer or a bread machine?

i woke up today with sore abs, sore triceps, from folding and refolding that dough yesterday, for ten minutes, with my floury hands. sore muscles! because while i kneaded, i thought to myself about the women who have done this thing for thousands of years, in egypt and europe and america, and how they might have taught it to me, if i'd had ears to listen.

of course, the bread failed. we baked compact little loaves, like zucchini bread. they failed to double in size during either waiting time. we have theories, but no one to give us an educated guess. we'll try again.

our tortillas are as thick as pita bread, but flavorful. we have to buy more flour, less plastic, imagining wheat ( & other) harvests in the future....

ffffffff

the weather here today is tinnily cold. icicles have hardened unflinchingly on the red porch railings, footprints in the snow have frozen into crenellated declarations of our presences. we seem impossibly permanent, immovable except by determined chipping away.

ffffffff

in the best news i've heard in months:

anne bonner (see picture at right) is most likely (not to jinx anything [can you believe "jinx" was a word in my crossword today?!]) moving to MONTANA!!!!!! unless the judge cannot endure her shivadelic dreads. (after all, she's not moving to missoula...)

anne will be a mere (and beautiful drive) three hours away, over the great divide, in the great falls. at the headwaters of the missouri, an undoubtedly sacred and much desecrated place. she'll be clerking and walking and flerking and plocking. we'll go spend time at the sun or marias or dearborn or smith -- or in glacier national park or the bob marshall wilderness. the bob is halfway between us, and so is the upper blackfoot river, and the scapegoat . on alternate weekends, anne will come west, into missoula valley, and we'll bake pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and bike into the rattlesnake and learn from the earth in my backyard.

last week, for the first time since living in missoula, i went over rogers pass, the mountain pass over the continental divide on highway 200, the road that runs from east missoula towards great falls. climbing the west side of the divide you are in the blackfoot watershed, and you are surrounded by (mined and logged, indeed) alpine forest. as you descend on the east side, you leave the forests behind for yellowed desert, rolling, rounded, sandy earth, and starkly towering buttes. this place looks like a geologist's heaven, the fist of the earth spread for a palm reading. we have so much to learn there, with anne.