Early Montana Love by Rosa

Landlady

She was a sour woman. An old woman with a muddy smell and sagging jowls. And she came late one night, after we were in bed, to tell my mother that for no particular reason, we had two weeks to find another place to live and move out. The conversation was held in hushed tones by the door. I slept in the living room then, on the bottom bunk, Leela above me. I could see the stars in the sky that night, in the darkness beyond my mother, standing at the door. She was angry. I’d never heard her speak to someone so harshly. But when she closed the door, the anger slipped off her like a sheet. She cried into her hands, her shoulders hunched. She thought I was asleep. So I pretended to dream.


A Penny a Grasshopper

My mother moved us to Montana when I was seven, Ally was ten, and Leela was five. She packed the car with her warm, calloused, capable hands. Clothes, books, food and our favorite stuffed animals. Ten days later we pulled off the sweltering highway into Missoula, and a few days after that we moved into a house on Strand Avenue, a quiet part of town, far from the university, toward the Bitterroot Valley.
At first, the house was hidden from view behind a forest of dry weeds, taller than I was. Mom spent a week hacking them down with a scythe, a vile-looking instrument that made my stomach grow hot with fear she might cut her leg or foot. She piled the stalks like hay from a loose bale near the alley in back. Then, came the grasshopper plague.
The greedy, green beasts pounced in pairs, stuck to our clothes and in our hair, leapt in ripples everywhere we walked, and ate everything they landed on. In competition, Mom hatched a plan. For each dead grasshopper, she would pay us a penny. We did not question her when she relayed her scheme to us, just eyed each other sideways in glee because we knew how easy it would be to kill a hundred and earn a dollar. We thought we may even be taking advantage of her.
We staked out the concrete walkway leading to the house, stomping on the unsuspecting, marring the sidewalk with gummy grasshopper innards. After the population thinned somewhat, we caught them in jars, shook them up, then dumped them on the killing field (the walkway). The raspy creatures sat there, too stunned to move, and were quickly smashed underfoot.


Rope Swing

A friendly giant of a tree stood in the far corner of our front yard. It had an oddly thick branch stretching far over the grass, perfectly parallel to the ground. As a child, it seemed to me this tree wanted more than anything to be our plaything. Its trunk had just enough knots and shoots to climb, and the branch hanging over the yard made for an ideal swing anchor. Mom threw a rope over the branch and since we didn’t have a tire, she made a loop at the bottom for our feet to rest. We raced and spun and skidded on the rope so much, we wore the grass down to dirt in a few weeks. In the summer, a couple turns on the swing was enough to cool the sweat on our skin. The soft, fine dirt below coated our feet, smooth and comfortable, like a second skin—an exotic skin, darker than our own, as if we had stepped for a moment into a faraway land.

Trees

In front of our house on Strand Avenue, on either side of the walkway leading to the front door, were two small “berry trees.” We called them berry trees because they formed soft, deep red, seed clumps that were shaped a little like bunches of grapes, but much smaller. The clumps, we crumbled in our fingers until we had jars and tiny baskets full of berries. They went in grass stews, stocked the kitchen of our troll house, and were frequently offered to our cat, although she refused to even pretend to dine on them.
In the winter, we buried small treasures under the snow at the bases of the berry trees, just so we could discover them in the spring thaw. Lockets in plastic bags, polished stones, rubber animals, and once, a silver dollar. None were ever recovered when the snow melted.

Horse Trailer

The yard was huge, really. Or perhaps only huge in the mind of a child. In any case, it wrapped around the house on three sides. In the “side yard,” the landlady had left a dilapidated horse trailer. She promised my mother she would haul it away. Some day. We, were quite happy she kept it where it was. Although an eyesore to our mother, the trailer was our cherished fort. We covered the holes in the floor with thin slabs of wood stolen from the alley. We cut weeds to make “hay beds” in the back. We set up shelves, on which we stored candles, matches, rocks we were particularly fond of, rope, and bouncy balls. In the afternoons my sisters and I would often lapse into our favorite game: pretending we were runaway orphans. We went on food scavenging missions, sneaking cheese and apples from the kitchen. Then we lit the candles and huddled around them, roasting chunks of cheese and whole apples over the flame, our faces drawn and pained (we never broke character). I still miss the taste of scorched, black streaked cheddar cheese.
But I haven’t told you the best part. The most exciting feature of the horse trailer was its heavy, iron mesh door. The door lay in the grass, nearly flat, connected to the floor of the trailer. One day, we discovered that if you hauled the door up with rope, as if to close the entrance, and then let it fall, it would crash to the ground in the most deafening, thunderous rumble. The first try brought our mother sprinting out of the house, expecting a bloody scene, I’m sure. She was not so impressed by the trailer’s most exciting feature and promptly put a cap on dropping the door at three crashes per day.
The saddest day, next to the night our landlady told us we had to leave, was the day she kept her promise of hauling the trailer away. We knew a few days ahead, during which the gate-crashing cap was revoked. But we didn’t feel like hearing its weight drop anymore. It made us sad.


Crystals in the Rock Pile

In the back yard, up against the fence near the alley, someone had created a pile of rocks. They were large, pale, egg-shaped rocks we liked to think were fossilized dinosaur eggs. Rocks are not too interesting unless they are shiny or colorful, so it took us quite a while to ferret out the secret that these were no ordinary rocks sitting in our yard.
One chilly spring day Leela and I were wandering around when we decided to wreak a little destruction on the rock pile. We picked up a hefty rock, paced backward five steps, and then hurled it back on the pile, reveling in the loud “clack” of contact and “shlllllllick” as the other rocks slid into a new resting place. One of these stones shattered, to our glee. We raced back to the rock pile, anxious to see if we could break any other rocks apart. That’s when we saw the crystals. The shattered rock was filled with a clear, yellow crystalline structure, smooth at the breaks. There were bits of crystal everywhere. We gathered the biggest and best, then carefully, scientifically, went about breaking open as many rocks as we could. Every one hid crystals inside.

Later, saying goodbye to our beloved Strand house, my sisters and I agreed that the Landlady would simply not appreciate the best things about our house. She had taken away our fort, probably to dump it in the landfill, where it would not be loved at all, but slowly rot and rust. She would cut down our well-used rope swing, let the berries from the berry tress fall, uncollected, and she would most certainly never notice or care that the rocks in the rock pile were magic and hid crystals inside a plain, rough exterior.