Summer in Limbo Montana

I am happily settling into my nomadic summer lifestyle.  Friday-Monday I work and live in Bozeman, MT…the town I was born in, but never technically lived in.  Bozeman feels like home though.  My family spent many holidays, summer vacations and shopping excursions in Bozeman.  My childhood dentist was in Bozeman.  He had hairy hands and never wore gloves.  My dear friend Emily, and fellow Bozemanite also had this guy as a dentist.  She remembers.   Shudder.  But…I digress.  I am living in Emily’s old bedroom in her father’s house.  A house that I, in a way, grew up in.  My family moved often.  Every four years brought a new wild vista, new friends and a new home.  Now my parents have settled in by the banks of the Bitterroot river, and I still am figuring out which cabinet holds the mugs and which one the cheese grater.  But the house on Foothills Drive in Bozeman I know every square foot of.  I know where the ice cream bowls are, which drawer has the Ziploc bags, and which drawer has the cheese grater.  I know the pipes in the guest bathroom squeak loudly at night, and I helped Emily place the glowing stars on her ceiling that still wink above me when I turn off the lights.  Outside I watch Reba, the Brittney spaniel, romp through the tall grass in the back yard and I remember how Bradley, Emily, Molly and I ran through the same section looking for Easter eggs so many years ago.  It’s nice to spend time in a house I was a child in.

The weather has been typical for Montana…84 one day…snowing the next.  Hopefully the sunshine prevails soon. Work is wonderful and difficult.  I come home at night and curl up in a chair in the living room and study, while Uncle Ken watches the PBS news and we tell each other about our daily adventures.  Veterinary medicine in Montana is wild.  We’ve already had a rattlesnake bite case.  The German shorthair involved is a good natured boy whose watermelon size swelling on his neck has faded to the size of a cantaloupe.  And on Saturday we had a lovely chocolate lab come in who had somehow been exposed to Strychnine.  She was seizing already but still had the presence of mind to try and bite while desperately trying to remove the IV catheter we were frantically trying to place.  Two hours, several dog wrestling matches, a stomach lavage, and soothing coat of charcoal later, she walked out of the hospital to her happily waiting parents.  Those cases make me ecstatic.  We have had our share of tears too.  Older pets that we’ve helped pass on, a puppy that was left in the back of a car on a warm day…those cases are difficult, and we cry in the back once the clients have left…but still we help. 

On my “weekends” I drive the beautiful four hours home to the new Puchlerz Lodge on the banks of the swollen Bitterroot river.  Inca and I are spending lots of time bonding and exploring.  She prances across the spring grass after birds and baby grasshoppers, a bright red garnet on a lush, evergreen canvas. Together she and I watch the new ducklings in the pond below…about 25 hatchlings in total.  Inca quivers beside me.  She and Lily are ban from the pond area until the “bath toys” are old enough to fly.  When not outside I sit beneath the big picture window framing the Sapphire range and search on-line for Inca and I’s new home in Oregon.  School starts in September and I hope that by August I’ll have a new address.  But until then Montana is a great place to float along.