PLACE TIES US TO ONE ANOTHER, STITCHES OUR MEMORIES TOGETHER with a fine hand. It stands, like a witness tree on a long-ago family farm, marker to love and death and loyalty.
For the last decade, we’ve made a pilgrimage together, father and son, to a stream in Montana, a mountain tributary miles and miles away from the valley and the river it eventually feeds. Willows and dogwood drape the banks. The undergrowth too thick to consider bushwhacking because the drainage is plentiful with grizzly bears.
There are pools where the water is forced downhill at breakneck speed, where light refracts, painting the surface turquoise. Here, snowmelt runs clear as a grandmother’s window in spring, blue-veined hand having wiped away winter with vinegar and water. After months of snow and
