I have kayaked the Missouri and read Hemingway on a sandbar under the raining hot sun.
I dream of floating from Pick City to Bismarck, camped out overnight along the way. See that old stump fire sparkle in the night from the far hills?
I have read thirty books, but want to count a 100 titles in less than a year. Steinbeck, Cather, Forster, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Oppenheimer. I can start a conversation and talk for two hours about books, ideas, people and places. Erdrich, Bellow, McCarthy, Burton, Speer, and Weizel.
Make that six.
The Elkhorn Ranch is sublime. I love the bend of the river, the jagged buttes, and haggard trees. The beauty of imagination lives in that valley.
Bullion Butte must not escape me. I see it in the horizon. Things must look different from the top. There's Little Heart Butte, and Crown Butte, and the Square Buttes. I must make a list of 10, and cross them off. You will be with me.
Let's sleep on the pontoon, sip wine into the night.
Heirloom tomatoes, such beauty. They will grow in the garden this year. Wait until we slice in September, a juicy kaleidoscope.
Surround yourself with life and I will do the same. Quiver for the quaking aspen, hearts beat for the butterfly bush. Hummingbirds how do you fly backward? I hear you Mary Oliver, words play within me. And oh, cottonwoods in a breeze how you dance with delight.
There is so much to do. Tonight I will turn a page, and then another. The creep toward 100. I'll dream of that sandbar, watching Orion sweep across the blackened sky.
Join me on the boat.
I'll close my eyes, thinking of Lawrence, Eliot, and Rand, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Conrad. Are you smirking Billy Collins? This is only the beginning.
