My garden is full of rocks. They come from Montana, from Mexico, from Rhode Island, Texas, Argentina and New Zealand. They come from the Columbia Gorge and Alaska and the Black Rock Desert. There are knuckly geodes from my home in southern Indiana. There are glossy agates from the California coast. There are delicate flat fossils of leaves that we found high on a mountain ridge in the Cascades.
My house is full of rocks, too. Also pine cones, rattly dried chestnuts, cactus wood, and feathers. Heavy cow thigh bones and delicate rodent skulls, intricate as origami. Wood shavings nibbled by beavers.
At this very moment my pocket is scratchy with crumbs of a dried-up lemon balm leaf.
Val and I both have/had some magpie tendencies.
Valerie especially loved rocks. Stones with holes where the water pushed persistently through. Pebbles rolled round by the tide. Chunks of granite rough with quartz, and the puzzle edges of rocks broken from hillsides. She particularly loved rocks from Tobacco Valley and the ranch, and brought some to Portland with every road trip. I think it was a way to haul the hemlines of both home geologies closer together.
Val was a cairn-builder, too. She liked the concentration of construction and balance; the solidity and airiness of the rock sculptures; and she liked it that the cows eventually kicked them over. I think she was drawn to the way a cairn looks against a horizon: all helter-skelter in shape but rising up audaciously for a little while, a surprise against the light.
A cairn is a testimony: we were here. Val was here. Val was here and made something distinct and beautiful. And when the cairn tumbles over, from cows or weather or shifts in the land, well: Val was still here. And the elements of that beauty are still here too, awaiting rearrangement.
In a few weeks we will be building a cairn for Val at the ranch. She picked us a good spot, a spot from which you can see the mountains, and the cottonwoods that grow around the springs. I’ve walked that ridge with Val so many times: holding binoculars, holding hands, holding time for a little while gently between our palms, smoothing its feathers. I’ve pulled her oxygen tank bumping on its little wheels over the tussocks of knapweed and around piles of deer droppings like olives. I’ve sat with her and the dog on that ridge and watched life happening in the field below: moments in the busy days of coyotes and bluebirds, pileated woodpeckers, eagles and owls, and families of elk and deer. This ridge is one of the places we will scatter Val’s ashes.
If you would like to send a small rock, from your travels or your garden or wherever seems good, we would be glad to include it in Val’s cairn. You can bring me your rock, or you can send it to Val’s dad:
Miles Garrison
1264 Burma Rd
Eureka MT 59917
I think Val — curious traveler, gifted community builder — would get a kick out of the convergence of geologies. And I know she’d get a kick out of Miles getting rocks in the mail.
Love,
Deborah
This is beautiful.