Aerie InternationaL - Missoula County Public Schools

informed of my fevered excitement. I didn’t write back.
Clouds hang in the sky with that awkward presence of not belonging
and knowing it. They have stretched themselves at breaking points into
feathers. You always expect the sunlight to burn them away, but it can
never succeed. They have been prophesized by farmers and weathermen
to always drift in feathery complacency from sky to bleached-blue sky.
If I press my cheek against my window and look to the side, I can see
Denver hunched in the distance, stewing in the crowd of brown smog
that sticks to the tips of building tops. We have two great pine trees
in our backyard, and I used to climb up and whisper to them that they
might perhaps work harder to make the air clean, because the brown is
rather ugly.
And yet… There are no horses, no ranches, no cowboys or ragged cliffs
on my way to school, no romance of logs and tumbleweeds and wolves
like smoke, but that does not mean that the wild has not found its way
into my home.
We have two great pine
trees in our backyard, and I
used to climb up and whisper
to them that they might
perhaps work harder to
make the air clean, because
the brown is rather ugly.
In winter, when the snow
gathers the nerve to crawl in
battleship clouds from their roosts
in the mountains and blast at our
houses, I can feel the warmth and
rush of nature pressing flush against
my bones. It drifts and packs
against the deadened blades of grass
and concrete rivers so that one
cannot discern what is of man
and what is of nature, what has been poured from trucks and what has
crawled up through the dirt. Some days, when I am alone in my
beautiful beast of a car, I pick up speed and grind the brakes so I slide
along the snow-packed road just to surrender to the power of ice and
snow for a handful of small moments. Come spring, when the wind
begins to get a hold on its fury and sends jet streams and gales to gasp
and roar between houses, and I lean into them like the arms of a lover. It
streaks in from the plains and yanks at my hair, my jacket, howling in my
hears that I am small and unaware of most things. By the time summer
rolls over and up against the mountains, the ice has melted away from
the street, leaving gouges in the asphalt that bounce us out of our seats
and test the reliability of seat belts. On one hotter day, I spent a whole
three hours at a friend’s house watching a mother hawk find food for her
children, and the bear sightings get closer and closer with each summer.
When fall reasserts herself, she grips flaming fingers around the land
and washes saplings and giants in reds and yellows. On mornings, it
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