In other news

1. In the nanoseconds of free time that I've had in the past month, I've been studying and celebrating old school Celtic traditions and holidays with my mom and Gram. Yesterday we ate blackberry tarts and drank wine for Michaelmas (and then had soup and homemade bread and cake for my birthday on Monday). I also celebrated the coming of the equinox, and my mom (the ultimate subversive pagan) had her kindergarten students create Equinox Crowns for themselves out of construction paper and sparkley leaf confetti. "They celebrated and didn't even know it."
2. Purple coneflowers (or Echinacea, to those of you who are botanically-minded) are dead and ready for de-seeding if you haven't gotten to it already. Take the cone part, cut it off the stem, and comb through it with your fingers to release the seeds. Make sure they're dry before you store them. They can be planted again next year or brewed into tea.
3. Everybody else is getting married or engaged right now, and it's really throwing me a loop. Andy and I talk about it a lot, since it's been over three years and I'm almost halfway through with my Masters and well on my way to real life. We're thinking of engagement next year and maybe getting married the following (we'd be 25). I hope he does the thing properly. I've officially fucked up most of the major landmark events of development in my life: I made prom into a complete joke by wearing an electric purple 80s flamenco dress and turning my hair into a whitegirl afro; I forgot to walk at college graduation... but this had better be done the right way.
4. Tomorrow is my birthday. 23. Officially mid-20s; how frightening. My middle schoolers still think I'm from the high school though, which for now I'll take as a compliment.

Northern migration.

Even though I know the wilderness areas around it have been on fire and filled the valley with thick smoke, tonight I have an aching gut homesickness for Missoula. I don't know whether I miss the place or just the way that I felt when I lived there, and I'm not really sure whether the two are even separable. When I think about Missoula it's just a surreal blur of nostalgic snapshots: there I am, wrapped head to toe in polarfleece, hiking up snowy mountain trails with Andy; or there we are, cooking a spaghetti dinner in my rented hovel (a tiny, Granny-Smith-green backyard shed that has horrible insulation and a fabulous furnace, at the address of 135 1/2 South 5th Street West, which never fails to baffle the local postman). Or we're ordering sandwiches (dill pickled to perfection) and buying unsual Hasbro gummy candies at Wardens before heading out to the sunny banks of the Clark Fork, where I read some appropriately riverish novel (David James Duncan) while Andy flyfishes further upstream. Or I'm shuffling frozen across the street in my pajamas with a load of wash in my arms, taking it to the Rainbow laundry place, which is full of decorative houseplants and has a softserve icecream/coffee bar, an indoor cabana in the corner, and a funny owner who always wears a short-brimmed, yellow bicycling hat. Or sometimes I'm shoe-skating over frozen rivers to get to the best fishing spots, or singing with Joni Mitchell as I wash dishes in front of the kitchen window and watch the purple sunset outside. Or I might be sprawled across a picnic table sunbathing, on a rare 75-degree day in March, puffy cumulus clouds floating lazily through the open sky; or maybe I'm waking up to a cup of hot chocolate in the Raven Cafe, where there's a punched tin ceiling overhead, and newspaper headline sexual innuendos are plastered ceremoniously all over the espresso machine. Or I'm walking around the block from Big Dipper, a scoop of handmade chocolate icecream perching precariously on a waffle cone... and I'm strolling past Ear Candy music (a great indie section) and then past the skate shop where "Lewis and Clark took a shit here" is written in the restroom.
Now that's nostalgia.

When I was away, I never got the same sinking homesickness for Oregon that I do for Missoula. Not that I don't love Oregon--I do, and its beauty amazes me every day--but sometimes I think I feel bogged down by 200 years of local family history and millions of miles of farmed fir trees. Oregon is great, but it might not be for me. Somehow Montana sings a different story, and it feels more like my own.
We're thinking of moving back, despite the job market problem.