Castle Lake is over 100 ft at it’s deepest point. I’ve been swimming in it but not today. Brrr, it was cold up there 5,440 ft above sea level. An odd sense of airy mystery hung about the place. There is history here, violent history from over 100 years ago, which I’ll not go into. Enough to say this majestic place leaves one a bit unsettled. Perhaps it was the odd and unexplainable sound which emanated from the rocks across the water. Somewhere between a moan and…well, who knows what! However it was good to be out and about with my monastic walking companion. There is little time left for our walks together before I catch the train north early Tuesday morning and today was a welcome change of pace. Especially since, remembered half way through our time together, it is the anniversary of each of our fathers deaths this day. We sat and remembered them over a cuppa sitting outside in the sun.

There has been little time these past days to post here. Unfortunately. Each day I intend to write and yet by the end of the day I’ve not done so. My justification and truth is that ‘people come before posts’ and so I’ve spent a good deal of energy, gladly, walking and talking and drinking tea and visiting and listening.

Thank you for your patience.

I can’t remember snapping this picture but when I found it on my phone I had to smile. The patterns, the busyness of what was probably early 1970’s era carpet and chair covering. The embroidered antimacassar. Wonderful. Nothing matches, nothing tones together. So unlike current indoor sensibilities. And a home SO full of memories of the woman who once lived there. And images of her beloved companion Dakota laying beside her, white as snow.

I smile at this photograph, it’s a smile of recognition. It conveys the essence of the person, Margaret, who is no longer around to fill the empty chair. And how she filled it! A genuine character, a homesteader from Eastern Montana moved West. My last memory of her in 2010 was throwing a large soft ball back and forth to help with her eyesight. She wasn’t taking difficulties sitting down!

There is something about a persons chair when they are alive too. I’ve sat down in a kitchen only to spring up and move knowing I’d sat in my hosts chair! Enter a room and their are clues as to which chairs or places on a sofa are free and which are not. I miss those clues sometimes (perhaps often) and then when I realize it’s not so easy to shift. Where I’ve been staying in Montana there was a rocking chair by the wood stove which had it’s own presence. It was both somebody’s chair and anybody’s chair and the chair once occupied where the cat would sit! The home was both somebody’s and anybody’s too.  A welcoming open-arm kind of  place. I’m so grateful for my time there.

And here I am back at Shasta Abbey, returning to the room I have been staying in since September. Glad to have traveled and glad to be back. Glad to be resting, as chance would have it, in my long gone teacher’s recliner.