I attended high school at a Lutheran boarding school 180 miles from our Montana farm for reasons of convenience and opportunity. Our parents were tired after chasing kids, for over thirty years by that time, and besides that, there was a top notch choral program there that provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in music.
At some point during my first couple of years there, I wanted to send a card to my Granny in Montana. I didn’t know her address, but she lived in the lovely little town with tree-lined streets and a big cattle auction ring in the Yellowstone River Valley, a place where they actually had irrigation systems with small canals accessing the rich farmland all around the town. They also had wells that gave usable water, drawn from a fairly high and constant water table. Even the people who lived on the farms spread out around the town had green lawns all summer. It was remarkable.
The farms were surrounded by flocks of sheep and fields of sugar beets that fed the equipment at the Sugar Beet Factory south of town that provided employment to generations of strong men whose parents and grandparents settled the valley. The histories of all of these good people were recorded by folks in the community and published under the fine title, Courage Enough in 1975. (more…)
