Gone, baby, gone

A card I found while cleaning out drawers -- perfect for our forthcoming trip!

We've rented our St. Louis house for six months, perhaps even a year, and we talk about the wonders of it -- a tenant who loves to garden and keep a clean house. The rent money, too, will help us as we move half of our stuff to Montana!  But for the moment, we're sitting on the St. Louis back deck, sipping Mojitos made from our garden's too-plentiful mint and watching sun tint evening clouds a perfect pink.

I call this Little Sky, just off our back deck in St. Louis and high above last century's brick houses.

We also go at least one more time to nearby Forest Park. It was overgrown, unsafe and nearly a goner when I moved here in 1980. Now, it's been restored (http://www.forestparkforever.org/) and can be quite breathtaking. A recent picnic on benches by the Grand Basin is about as close as we get to big sky here.

Medium Sky -- the Grand Basin, and Saint Louis Art Museum atop the hill.

 We are hungering for mountains.

This was the view from a picnic last year in the Sapphires, looking across the valley to the Bitterroots.

I actually like Big Sky better from the valley floor. It can dwarf you as well as energize you, like no other view.

Rainbow, sun and storm clouds all at once, on the valley floor near Victor, Mt.

One last time, I serve on jury duty in St. Louis; I'd got out of twice before, for other Montana trips.

Juror 241, at your service.

My nephew, Andrew Homan, is manager of civic education for the Indiana Bar Foundation. I write him of my fate, from the jury-assembly room...

We sit, we read, we serve.

...and he emails back that he's probably the only person who'll tell me he hopes that I get picked.  I have served several times before, once as foreman in a criminal trial. Somehow, this time, out of more than 300 potential jurors and six or seven trials, I am among the 15 or so who never get picked by the shuffle of a computer. I read the "Hunger Games" straight through and, on my lunch hour, enjoy parts of a renovated downtown...

A stainless-steel bench in the new Citygarden, downtown St. Louis.

A shadier spot in Citygarden, for lunch of a sandwich and coffee.

A walk to see shiny new buildings next to classic old St. Louis ones of red-on-red brick.

At times I feel as if we're leaving St. Louis just when it's getting good. How funny is that? We're not really leaving. We still have a renovated, recently tuck-pointed, re-roofed and mostly furnished, handsome brick house here, circa 1911, with a tiny, tiny gem of a garden out back. We shall return!

A bowl of salad fixings started from seed (as were the tomatoes and eggplants, in smaller pots on either side, all going to Montana) sits on my St. Louis back deck, above a small circle of lawn, variegated Solomon's seal, ferns, hostas and a pond, with a big stand of what else?  'Becky' shasta daisies (Leucanthemum x superbum) just beginning to bloom.