July, 2000

Reacting to the hidden sunset, mountains and clouds take turns glowing pink and shadowing indigo on the other side of Lake McDonald, which reflects the color and smudges it sideways. I can no longer resist the urge to bring my easel out to the porch to try to capture the last minutes of light.

The July sun sets late this far north in Montana, after ten there is still light in the west. The mountains have absorbed an afternoon of the sun's energy into their deep rock, and they relinquish it only slowly. The late clouds pass over and darken, then redden again, and long after the sun disappears the peaks remember, and burn like embers, then slowly fade in the cool blue mist.

The stars come out, but not the moon, yet. Bats swing over my head and when John comes out and we talk for a long time, until we see the Milky Way, and then our first view of the Northern Lights, green veils falling softly over the black silhouettes of the mountains. Then, from behind their ridges, another glow, the moon is rising.

• • •

The house I am given to live in as artist in residence inspires abstraction of space and views. Slipped between the cedars in 1962, its geometric lines fit perfectly with the cedars straight silvery trunks, which grow so close that the edges of the porch is cut in places to accommodate them. The impression is like that of a Mondrian painting, if he had picked up Braque's pallet by mistake.

Everywhere in this house leads everywhere else. From the hillside drive you step down to a porch which wraps around the lakeside of the house and ends in cedar-stump steps down to a door, which opens to inside another door, out to the porch, down a level to a cellar door which leads upstairs to huge windows which look out to Synder ridge, and the lake.

The porch outside the windows overlooks the lake so closely that, when sitting on it, there is no pebbly beach visible between its weathered floor and the turquoise, and cerulean surface of the water which stretches to the opposite shore.