if time ran all at once

My friends, it has been almost six weeks. It feels like a handful of days. I have been having a hard time writing, but I wanted just to let you know that the memorial weekend in Eureka was complex and healing, and drenched in the beauty Val so wanted this story to have.

On Saturday morning we had a service at the Baptist church: Sandy and I spoke again, and there was prayer and music, and a lovely reception afterward. Everybody cried. A couple of Val’s old teachers came over and hugged me, and all kinds of people spoke warmly to the family, to me, and to our contingent of friends.

(The first time I attended the little, A-frame Baptist church, years ago, I asked Val about a Bible verse on a hand-made hanging against the wall. In cursive felt letters it read, “As for me and my horse, we serve the Lord.” Is that some kind of Montana thing, I wondered? After she finished laughing, Val clued me in that the word was “house,” not “horse.” But ever since then, whenever declaring a plan of action or point of view, we’ve always begun, “As for me and my horse…”)

Besides me and the family, six of Val’s friends from Portland and Chicago were able to join us in person. Scores more of you sent rocks and letters and love. The weekend was a perfect sunny idyll between rainy weeks, and the ambulatory among us spent hours exploring Val’s beloved ranch land, which in June was wonderfully green. My feet cooperated enough to do some walking and to climb the ladder (a 3-year milestone) into the hayloft of the barn. We had a campfire one night, and another night we lay out in the field on sleeping bags (and eventually, under them – it was cold) trying to pick out constellations and telling stories.

On Sunday morning as the rays of sun topped Mt Ksanka we held a simple, beautiful ceremony on the ridge overlooking the fields and woods. We read some words, sang some songs, and laid our stones on the small heap of glacial rocks already piled up over the years by Val and, more recently, by her sisters. Tuley found a skinless tennis ball somewhere and brought it over, so we added that too. Val’s father Miles scattered some of Val’s ashes over the cairn and we stood quietly in the sunshine, listening to the crows down in the woods and the baby magpies in the apricot tree calling for breakfast.

Over the weekend we visited several small cairns around the property, and began plenty of our own, scrabbling through the rock piles cleared by diligent earlier ranchers. We brought some more of Val’s ashes to places she had particularly loved. We recounted memories and gathered bleached cow bones. The sun kept shining a show-offy gold through decorative clouds, and we took scads of pictures. The dog galloped over the hills and got covered in burrs. There were a lot of great conversations. There was a goofy line dance captured on video. There was tree-pruning and knife-sharpening and the making and eating of enormous meals. There were three RVs on loan from cousins and friends, and Tuley’s new ambition in life is to lounge in the doorway of an RV with lots of her pack accounted for inside, gazing smugly out at the cows and other suckers who aren’t surreptitiously getting fed goldfish crackers by doting aunts.

Here is a picture of a lot of us and some cairns we built, at a spot where Tanner (our nephew) and I built cairns after Betty’s funeral in April, as Val and Miles supervised from the van. In this picture we are also trying to pose as cairns. You can see there are many personal interpretations of this mandate.

Last year Val wrote this about the ranch, her heart’s home:

“back at the ranch. the mortar of my psyche. where, if time ran all at once, there would be thousands of me swarming over every hill. and the place where, whenever i am here, every other place feels like something i’ve made up.”

Nothing is the same without Val. But I could see her in memory everywhere I looked. Thousands of her on every hill.