I was driving west towards Missoula, on my way to work. Brandi Carlyl was playing her second evening show at the Kettlehouse Amphitheatre, and highway 200 that cuts past our dirt road was pinched narrow from the cars parked bumper to bumper on either side.
I tapped my breaks through the narrow passage where temporary fluorescent crosswalk signs flashed. I was listening to Brandi sing “The Mother” in my car, turned low, I could also hear her singing live against the microphone from out my right side window as I passed the venue.
The night before, Dave and I listened to her first show from our wicker bench on the back porch, a mile and a half distance from the amphitheatre. I hadn’t heard her music before. The chords of a full band mixed with rattling birch leaves and the robin’s trumpeting calls became together a whole magnified sound. It sounded as if the chords were descending from the low northern clouds, causing the wind and birds to stir up in a frenzy. The vibrations we caught in our ears were stretched, so we couldn’t hear the words of the songs, only the notes and the waves of human cawing at the end of each song.
After the gusts of music dropped back to silence, and the last of the sun dragged between the Elm trees, I chopped white onions and vine tomatos for salsa and played Brandi’s song, “The Mother”, back to back in the kitchen.
I was drawn back to this song the next day, and days after. She sings, “Outside of my windows are the mountains and the snow/ I hold you while you’re sleeping and I wish that I could go/All my rowdy friends around accomplishing their dreams/But I am the mother of Evangeline”.
I was not surprised by what she admits, at all. I anticipate eventually I will feel the same way, if I ever hold my own sleeping child on my chest.
Nothing, right now, is as permanent in my life as a child would be. Not the doublewide in Bonner off highway 200, or the job in Missoula, or my relationship with Dave. Not even my choice to live in Montana feels like it has to be permanent.
Sometimes I do see flashes of a child in my mind. I imagine what she would look like. Strawberry curls, her conscious eyes. What she would like me for, hate me for.
The sun was beginning to set on my drive. I passed the empty baseball field and the brick elementary school on my left and the fenced-in parking lot for the old mill on my right. A heavy last light began to coat the backs of maple trees lining the road, and it flooded the intervals of sidewalk between them.
Everything becomes part of a golden story in the minutes before the sun draws back behind the mountains. Light becomes heavy over the concrete and metal roofing. It leans on your chest and reveals the dust in front of you; you can see a pinch of dandelion seed fuzz spinning and carried across your vision.
I was aware of the light, and the diffused sound of the concert, mixed with a recording of “The Mother” playing from inside my car. I live a turn off the highway where the only service signs are a gas station, a cafe, and a drive-through coffee stand. Light and sound fall here, in Bonner, as generously as any place I’ve seen.
