02/18/2026
There is a baby lamb warming in our hallway, colostrum on the counter. Castration bands in the drier, and bits of hay everywhere. I tickle our youngest daughter’s milky skin with the backs of my hands - my palms are too rough. Jeremiah - with his grip that could steady a tree - leaves before the sun rises and in so doing is out the door a little earlier than the day before. And while the days are slowly lengthening it is still quiet - the waiting air allowing the Lostine River, which runs through our ground, to be the loudest voice in my head. I can feel the river’s percolating strata, how I love the underground. I can feel the Lostine collapsing towards its center current while still reaching for its edges.
Like more rivers than folks probably realize, the Lostine River was straightened in sections to accommodate farmland, settlements, and irrigation draws. Every time a tree falls, by beaver or wind or crashing ice dam, the river reclaims some of her curves. Sediment still moves too much downstream, but steady she goes widening a curve here and deepening a pool there. She knows she wasn’t meant to be a straight shot, and she’ll jump her banks to feed the floodplain when given a chance. The season she finds her way back to her cottonwood and birch groves is one I hope to see.
Last year carried us in its own energetic current. It felt as though the patterns we set in motion six years ago, and asked you all to join us in, are generating their own lift. The seasonal rhythm of breeding and birthing and growing and ending - and you all adding yourselves to the beauty and consequence of it all - has been slowly depositing layers of trust in my river rock colored bones. There is devotion in what we are doing together and the river, as both medium and metaphor, says “keep going”. There is much to do to recharge our ecosystems inside and out, but mooring ourselves to the seasons - their beauty and their brutality - opens doorways to a life rich in gestures and meaning.
Thank you for riding this life-taking life-giving river with us.
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