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.