With different eyes...

We stopped in Winnett, MT on our way home from Lewistown, to use the restroom at Gershmel's store, on Main Street.  My Uncle Marvin and Aunt Betty lived in Winnett, once upon a time, when I was pretty young and my cousins Brett, Blaine and Karleen were so impressive to us country cousins because they really knew their way around town. They rode their bikes to the swimming pool, unchaperoned! Shocking. It seemed so BIG to us, then!  And it really was more populated in the late 70s and early 80s, although the big boom of people and business had been many, many years earlier.

I usually end up driving through on the main route to Roundup, on my way to Billings, and miss the back streets of the town. This time, though, I didn't get the "I gotta go potty, NOW, Mom!" signal until we were right upon the second turn into town....the back way that MY Mom always turned into, because it led more directly to Uncle Marvin's house.  We rumbled down the gravel, down through the edge of town, and I saw it with grownup eyes, for the first time that I can remember.  Of course, it's much different now...if I look very, very carefully, I can see where Mosby's house was...I recognized the big trees where the front yard had been, although a lot of them were missing.

It was startling, and a little sad to see the edges of town crumbling back into the country; like a good woman who'd had a hard life and was aging in a not-so-graceful way.  I wanted to take some pictures of some of the things that struck me, but all I had was my Droid camera, so they aren't great.  I took them anyway.  They are so very typical of how these little Montana towns are drying up and dying. There are some really great things about Winnett, too...truly the nicest swimming pool around, great grocery store, beautiful school...but I saw the fading things, this time, so that's what I'm showing. 


The Winnett Bar and Grill...the recliner and sofa outside really add to the ambiance, I think.  Oddly, I didn't even notice them right at first, because they sort of fit into the picture. I don't know how the bar is doing, now, but it used to be a fairly hopping place.

The sign....I'm liking the 16 oz steaks offered. 

This old truck caught my eye!  Not just the color, either; there's something about where it was parked and its form...

This is a picture of the corner of Grand and Main Street.  I kind of chuckled, because both of those street names seem to evoke ideas of population and big things in a town.  It's pretty quiet, here.

The hotel sign, with the edge of the buttes in the back ground.  I'm not sure if the hotel is still open; it was a few years ago, and at an incredible bargain of something like $35 + tax per night. 

This old building is also on the corner of Grand and Main, and the style is very intriguing to me.  I can't tell if it was a home or some sort of business.

Closer look....see the dormer? Curious....

I'd like to return, with my good camera, and get details.

It was middle of the day, with awful light and a terrible camera...bleh! 

I know my cousin Brett reads the Chronicles, and perhaps he can fill us in on the finer points of some of these images. 

As I was taking the pictures, I thought of my friend Mark who writes the Daily Montana blog I enjoy so much.  This would be right up his alley!

The Empire Cafe

This is Part II of the Central Montana Fair experience, but that last post was exhausting, both to the reader and the author! 

I took the kids to the Empire Cafe for breakfast, with their blessing, because as Maggie put it: "McDonalds really isn't all that good, is it Mom?"
Amen, child! 

Breakfast at the Empire is like this:

The waitress is a gramma-like person, bustling and busting her butt for the coffee crowd, who come in (and I'm not kidding) at straight up 8 a.m.  We got there around 7:50, so we got a table and her full attention for 10 minutes.  I wanted to hug the waitress, and honestly, she probably would've not thought it strange...it's that homey there. 

There's nothing pre-fab or glossy about the Empire.  When our waitress brought coloring pages for the kids, they were carefully chosen for each, having been torn out of coloring books behind the counter.  For Maggie, there was a fashionable picture of ladies with frou-frou dogs.  For Angus, simple Mickey Mouse pictures.  Perfect.  You could tell they came from two different coloring books and that she'd nailed down their preferences when we walked in the door. 

This is a place where the omelettes are made such that the egg wrapping the ingredients within is an after-thought. The link sausages are as big as kielbasa, requiring only one per order; the most wonderful breakfast sausage I've ever had...not fatty at all, just good pork and spices.  The pancakes are soft on top, with a little crust on the bottom that ensures they don't fall apart when the syrup weakens them.  The hashbrowns are done just right...crispy AND soft. 

The picture on the wall beside us was the Golden Eagles FFA Chapter, 2009.  To the left, a 2011 Golden Eagles cheerleader poster; to the right, a MidRivers Communications wall calendar with a view of (again) Ekalaka, Montana.

The old gentlemen at the table ahead of me ordered coffee, big surprise to no one, even though the waitress courteously asked if they wanted to think about something more.  (I'm guessing they'd already had their oatmeal at home, with the Mrs., and would eventually order an egg and toast by the time 10 a.m. rolled around.)  They then proceeded to interview the one designated representative who had attended the Central Montana Fair, the night before.  The attendee was sitting in the middle and warmed right to the task.  He gave quite a detailed review of the rodeo, including the saddle bronc re-ride that was PAINFULLY slow to half-heartedly buck out of the chute after two tries. He also informed them that there were no rides at the carnival to speak of and really, the only one worth taking a glance at was the ferris wheel. (Keep in mind the gentleman was 82, if he was a day, and an escalator at Neiman Marcus would probably have taken his breath away.)  The others leaned in while he was giving his scathing review, then leaned back in their old cafe chairs collectively, with sighs, shaking their heads over how the fair had gone to hell in a handbasket since 1968.  I wanted to hug them, too; they were that dear.  But I couldn't let on like I'd heard them.

When we went to the counter, to pay for our mountains of food ($18.75 and the coffee was free!), they were just starting in on politics and it sounded to be a long coffee hour or two.  Deliciously indignant about the state of the union, they were on their second carafe of decaf, and picking up steam.

We paid for our food, thanked the waitress and she beamed at the $5 tip (I HAD to...you know she wasn't going to make much on the parsimonous political commentators.) and then asked if the kids could have a treat, which startled us all!  Well, sure.  From underneath the counter, she pulled a big old container of lollypops and assorted tooth rotting confections and told the kids to pick one.  They delightedly pulled Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pops out and left the cafe with sticky, happy smiles.

Maggie said, on our way to the car, "You're right, Mom.  That IS the best place in the world for breakfast!"

It really is, child.  It really is!

*Postscript:  We ate breakfast around 8 a.m.. It's now 5 p.m., I've had nothing else to eat all day because I was so satisfied from breakfast, and still not a bit hungry.  Considering my breakfast cost about $6.75 and it's kept me good for three meals worth, it's an astonishing good deal! 

Central Montana Fair 2011

Against all sound reason and intelligence, I decided once again to take the kids to the Lewistown Fair.  You'll remember last year that Maggie bit a Waterman child, I lost Angus at NIGHT at the carnival, we almost died of heat exhaustion...all those great memory-making moments that everyone says I'll look back on and laugh, but really were awful. Still are awful; there's no cotton candy coating it.

On the way to the fair, I was wondering why I continue to try to do this, why I try to make this a tradition when it's really only important to me and not anyone else. 

Well, I'll tell you why.

We got to the fair when everything was just starting to wake up, on Thursday.  The vendors were uncovering wares, the food stands were starting their grills, 4-Hers were still all clean and pressed before showing, the carnival workers were still tired from the night before so they weren't all that excited about pressing us into playing games to win lousy blowup alien dolls. Mamas with little kids were there, because it was cool and not yet naptime.  Old folks were there, checking out Mrs. Matovich's hollyhock entry or Mr. Johnson's shocking shock of corn, having coffee at the Methodist booth and a piece of pie as well.  It was just as a county fair should be. 

As the day went on, more people showed up...mostly farm and ranch people, because everyone else is still at work for the most part, I think.  One of the best things about Montana, for a native Montanan, is that people are always trying to find a connection between you and them.  When the kids and I sat down at a table with our Methodist hamburgers and hotdogs, a retired couple started visiting with us and we discussed the merits of country schools and ranch life.  The old gentleman owned a jewelry store on Main in Lewistown, having sold the ranch a few years ago to settle in comfortably to town life.  The lady (with a dandy sun hat and sweet, round cheeks that made me want to pat them) had been a kindergarten teacher for 35 years and was particularly taken with Angus. Everyone is particularly taken with Angus, so that was no surprise.  But they knew Weedings, from the Jordan country.  There was the connection.

This happened time and again, people pleasantly saying hello, commenting on the nice weather for the fair or my filthy-but-adorable (?) children, then introducing themselves and trying to find that connection.  An absolute sweetheart of a girl about Maggie's age...red hair, freckles on creamy skin, grubby knees, serious AND smiling, all at the same time...befriended my kids on the roller coaster and escorted them to the very best of the carnival rides for about half an hour, while I stood and held the plastic blue blowup alien and dolphin that they'd "won", sweating and thinking about funnel cakes. 

There's the rodeo.  I took my kids to the rodeo; their first ever!  Isn't that crazy?  For a woman whose email is "chuteboss"?  It's a darn shame, is what it is! 

Anyway, around 6 p.m., the rodeo crowd shows up for the 7 o'clock show...and we (I include myself in this insanity) all decide, frantically, that we MUST eat before we watch the rodeo.  This is a tricky situation, because if you stand in line for food, you lose the option of good seats.  But if you get good seats, you might not get any of that wonderful Grass Range Boosters' taco salad.  Oh, the dilemma!  People like me found their seats and parked their kids to save them, admonishing them not to move a muscle, and catching the eye of the old couple sitting behind them with the understanding that if the children were awful, they should thump 'em with thier cane.  It works.  The retirees have entertainment for the 45 minute wait, the kids have chaperones unbeknownst to them, I can elbow my way back through the famished crowd for (and this is the exact order of my family) cheese pizza, a hotdog, chips, lemonade and if I could manage it, I could balance a cheeseburger for myself on top.  Maybe.

It took 20 minutes.

The kids were still there, being good from the tops of their frazzled little heads to the bottom of their filthy little toes.  The older couple looked bemused, still, and all was good and right. 


They ingested the food in about 5.9 seconds, washed 'er down with more lemonade than I thought possible, and started asking when the rodeo was going to start. 
We still had...20 minutes, according to the announcer. A veritable YEAR of waiting, to a 7 and 5 year old!


I was busy watching people, and it was a good show.  Families with kids of all ages, Hutterites speaking their German and laughing, old cowboys, young cowboys, little bitty cowboys in the making, girls with more rhinestones than Dolly on her best day, former native Lewistownians who came home for the fair wearing college shirts and/or Keens, teenagers that didn't want to be there but didn't want to miss anything so they were texting their friends to tell them how lame the rodeo scene was, National Guardsmen, some tourists that I'm guessing were from California or maybe Missoula, neighbors that held up traffic on the grandstand to talk about haying, and the list goes on.  (This was just the rodeo crowd.  It gets much stranger on the other side of the grandstand, when the darkness falls over the fairgrounds and the midway comes alive.)

The rodeo itself was great!  It's NRA sanctioned and most of the cowboys and cowgirls are fairly local...if you can call Ekalaka local to Lewistown. The bareback horses were snaky, just as they should be. The bulldogging was pretty much a loss, with only two steers dogged...the rest either out ran the bull dogger's horse or slammed on the brakes about 10 feet out of the chute and the guys blew past them leaving no forwarding address.  Good calf ropers, all. (They call it tie-down roping, but I grew up with calf-roping.  Is that a southern thing that they changed to?  I don't know.) We got all bogged down when it got to the barrel racing (as usual, in a rodeo) and ended up leaving after the team roping, which I INSISTED we watch, but the kids were twirling like tops in their seats so it wasn't fun for anyone. 

After a couple rides in the dark, with all the sparkly lights, we got a Tiger's Paw, a big honkin' piece of fry bread coated with our choice of powdered sugar, cinnamon sugar or honey.  It was glorious and sticky and heavy and fried...the bow on top of our fair experience...and staggered to the car. 

Curtains on the fair.
It was a good one.
We'll be back next year!


*Picture of kids and Alien, the alien (Angus is not really great with original names....) at Winnett, on the way home.  Even the alien looks tired...

How my garden does grow...

I have a few readers who really ARE into gardening, and I feel obliged (delighted) to keep them updated on the seasons in my yard.  These pictures are ALREADY 10-14 days old!  *sigh*

Without further ado...

Gaillardia (Indian Paintbrush) in front of salvia (Russian, Traci...*big wink*)

I love these two together...they're so bold! Very "July in the garden"...

And the birdhouse I love, but apparently no birds feel the same way...

Not one look, or even a perch, for heaven's sake!

(They will, however, build and rebuild and rebuild a nest in the end of our rain gutter. Pish!)

Ah, ladybug...looking a little bedraggled, so I'm assuming Maggie got there before me.

Forellenschluss!  See, Fontie? Spotted trout lettuce is the prettiest thing in my raised beds; thank you!

Except, perhaps, the ruffly lettuce sitting beside it...that's awfully pretty, too...

Happy faced little pansies, early in the morning.

Do you remember the movie The Sound of Music?  And the song Edelweiss?

"...every morning you greet me; small and white, clean and bright, you look happy to meet me!"

Well, these are purple, but I think they're still happy to meet me.

This was a happy accident, letting a hollyhock grow in this particular bed.  I hope to repeat it next year, because it's simply stunning, in structure and color...

What do you think?

Nasturtiums just GLOW, especially against cilantro!

Here she is, again...

Alcea, you bring a smile to my heart!

We have grasshoppers so thick that they jump in waves in front of the lawn mower.  That is not an exaggeration.  I probably won't have much left after this week, except the tiny little tomatoes that I am praying over, daily.  WHY do they stay green so eternally long? It's not easy, being green!  So turn red or yellow or purple, or whatever color I planted but can't remember.

How is YOUR garden growing?

Bigfork

I know you're all wondering, but are too polite to ask, where I've been. Well, except Homer who could stand the suspense no more and wrote me a "Where ARE you?" email. (See? Someone misses me...)

The kids and I loaded up the Trailblazer and drove west to Bigfork, MT to visit family/friends. 

Dear friends that became family a long time ago and we've forgetten that we're not blood relatives, you know.

In the movie, While You Were Sleeping, Sandra Bullock's boss exasperatedly tells her, "Lucy! You're BORN into a family!  You don't just join one...like the Marines..."

Well.

I beg to differ.

And here we are, Grandpa Jasper, Grandma Celestia and the crew.

We really just drove there, settled in and proceeded to sleep, eat, play and sun, repeat; for 4 1/2 days!

That being the case, there really aren't a lot of tourist-y, vacation-y photos of the whole trip.

There ARE wonderful pictures of laid back, good times for your enjoyment!

Jaspers live on the edge...and I mean RIGHT on the edge...of an airport/runway. Now you'd think it would get noisy and annoying, but it's really quite fun, with each plane getting a wave and goodluck wishes.  There isn't a huge amount of action, most of the time, but Monday, before we left to come home, there must've been eight planes that took off before noon!  That's a lot of waving...

On to the water sports!  The kids got big water pumps for their birthdays and it was SO much fun to chase around, trying to soak each other.

Please note: appropriate swimwear!!!  It's a big deal.

 I love this picture of Celestia! And that's how we spent most of the afternoons...

I don't know if you can read the title on this book; it made me laugh!

Come Out of the Kitchen: A Romance

Well, heck yeah!

I read a LOT...and that was a gift, because I haven't been reading much, lately.

You might wonder why I'm posting a picture of a percolater...besides thinking that I've gone over the edge with my coffee love.  Frank Jasper, Celestia and Jasper's oldest son, and I worked that poor old pot over, removing the coffee oils from all the crannies and when we got done, it was so beautiful that I had to take a picture! It's home-y, to me.

Meet Frank...he's going to law school in Missoula, but drove up to visit on Sunday.  It was good to have a brother to fight with... :)

I have some more pictures on my phone that I'll put up as soon as I get them transferred over, but really, this is what it was!

I love summer.

Horse Crazy

What is it about horses that can make ordinarily rational, conservative people just a little nuts?  Not a bad sort of crazy, really; just a little on the "what the heck?" side of it.

Little girls, for some reason, are always nuts for horses.  I don't think I've ever encountered one that hasn't at one point gone through a little period of horse love.  And not just country girls, although they have it bad.  My daughter is no exception.  This year, for her birthday, she wanted a Breyer horse and a diary that locked. (More on the diary, later...) She's given up asking for a REAL horse for every birthday, Christmas, Groundhog's Day, etc. and resorted to the model horses. 

In the box, there was a nifty "magazine"/catalog about Breyer horse models, designed to encourage the collecting and appreciation of the figurines.  Things like which models are most desirable to own, books and model sets, and how to take your model horse to a horse show and win.

I had to come to a screeching halt when I read about the model horse shows. 
This is where the "crazy" part comes in.
Let me share an excerpt from the magazine:

Did you know that you can compete in judged competitions with your model horses, in many of the same ways people compete with their real horse?
Model horses compete in "halter" and "performance" divisions.  The halter classes have a separate division and classes for each horse breed (and sometimes color classes).
How do you judge 50 Breyer Arabians, when several copies of the same model/color may be in the class? It comes back to those subtle differences in painting and finish quality. A judge may note that one bay Arabian is darker and more richly shaded than the others and give that the edge.

I mean to tell you, folks; this is SERIOUS.
It gets better.
More from the magazine:

Performance showing (and I wondered how this was possible) is possibly the most interesting, fun and interactive part of model horse showing.  This is where you can put all those wonderful Breyer tack and accessory items you've been gathering to the test!
Shows are typically divided into English, Western and Other performance; each division has classes in each type of event you'd see at a horse show.  You bring your model to the table when the class is called, with well-fitted tack and appropriate obstacles or props.  The goal is to portray in miniature a "stop-motion" phase of the event.  The judge will grade the class on accuracy, tack fit, proper placement/action and more.

I'm my father's daughter and I didn't know whether to be horrified or completely amused.  Perhaps horrifically amused. Apparently, this is a big, honking deal across the U.S.!  Now, I'm as competitive as the next girl about...well, everything...but I'm not sure I could show up at one of these shows with my little plastic horse and seriously get worked up about winning my division and class.  And you KNOW there are adults there that are entering, trying to kick some little 10 year old's plastic horse around the block with their obviously superior, darker, more richly shaded plastic horse. 

Sheesh.

And then, last night, I watched the movie "Secretariat". 
What a GREAT movie!  

If you have not seen it, I urge you to hustle on over to Netflix or your library and find a copy. I want to own it, and I only say that about maybe 10 movies in as many years. I don't know if it was the housewife, believing in a dream that came to fruition after blood, sweat and tears, or if it was the horse that really ran the Belmont in a time that has still been unmatched, or what, but it was very, very good.  You don't even have to be crazy about horses to appreciate the story!