Missoula News

Column: Savagemama

Cottonwoods, Magnolias, Sage and Redefining Home

By Jennifer Savage, 3-22-07

The other day my daughter and I were walking around our five acres checking out the buds on the trees, the water in the irrigation ditch. With her on my hip I walked out to the pasture and could see the hint of the green to come. Gold and fallen over, the grass was ready for spring and so was I.

We watched baby cows in our neighbors’ field, I hollered for our wayward yellow lab and we headed back for the house, as the air grew cooler. On our way, I stopped at a small cottonwood tree. I squeezed a bud tip not expecting, but happy to find, the blood-red stickiness that comes just before these trees leaf out in spring. I rubbed this gooey paste between my fingers and brought it to my nose. It smelled like windows open in the still morning, dogs that have been rolling in new grass, walks in the woods and chilly nights around a friend’s barbeque. I could feel my shoulders grow slack with the coming of spring.

It occurs to me that the smell of cottonwoods may be the backdrop of my daughter’s childhood. It will be one of those scents trapped in her bones because she was born in Montana on a summer night.

In this way we are already different.

My childhood carries the scent of maple leaves turned pale side out to a coming thunderstorm, summer soft nights thick and wet, and the heavy perfume of my grandmother’s magnolia.

Snow capped mountains may comfort my daughter the way the rolling lush hills of the South comfort me. Like my husband, she may believe eighty degrees feels hot and thirty degrees is not that cold. The smell of smoke from the woodstove, dirt on her hands from the garden, goat milk in her cereal bowl – she will absorb the details of this place and they will become the standard by which she measures everything. She will keep these details some place deep and small.

This last month my little girl has done some traveling, first to see her grandparents in the South then to my husband’s childhood home in the high desert of Central Oregon. Without really meaning to we’ve found ourselves taking her to all of the places we carry with us even though we barely know we do. My grandmother’s house, the Deschutes river, my college campus, Seth’s parents’ barn.

Taking Eliza to the South was like placing the last piece of a puzzle and allowed me to bring her home to Montana feeling much closer to where I grew up. She will not know the South as her own but she’ll know it as me just as I know the scent of sage and juniper as Seth. She’s helping me reconfigure home. And somehow that is comforting.

At seven months old Eliza is becoming her own person, a spirited squirmer that moves and chatters all of the time. Even though she started here with me, I know she will not stay here. She will grow independent and strong and away from me. She will like things I don’t, make decisions I wouldn’t and scare me because she is so, so brave.

But for now I can’t imagine a time when she won’t fit in the crook of my arm, on my hip. So I’ll squeeze cottonwood buds and let the stickiness cover both of our hands. When she catches the scent on the breeze and I smell it in her hair, it will smell, to both of us, like home. 

Jennifer Savage writes about being a new mom on her own blog here on NewWest.Net. Read more from “Savagemama” at www.newwest.net/savagemama.

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