It is the beginning of evening in Helena.  Snow is floating down.   A wind has suddenly picked up, carrying a cold bite, coming from the north, from Canada.   The sidewalks are now powdered with a thin layer of snow.  The yard is frozen, the straw-colored grass, trampled down.   He walks down from under the porch, and looks up at the sky.  Tiny flakes saturate the air, like a mist.  In the distance, he hears a horn blast from the Burlington Northern train, clear and deep.

He loves early winter in the northern Rockies.  Not yet the prolonged bitter cold.  The surrounding sheltering mountains, and he quiet and solitude of winter.  People off the streets.  Dark green pines amid all the the whiteness, the smell of wood-fired chimneys.  He likes the shelter of winter.  Activity slows.  You are not coming and going.  Time slows.

He has been retired ten years, but his mind keeps returning to his diplomatic career, to the Foreign Service.  The time in Africa, working on Ethiopian famine, fighting Liberian dictatorship, analyzing Rwandan massacres.   Mozambique, and negotiations at the Vatican.  His first tour, Israel, carrying messages to Moshe Dayan at home, watching Sadat fly into Jerusalem.  Mainly, he remembers Russia, the Soviet era, then, the early Yeltsin years, Aeroflot flights from Moscow to the east, through nine time zones, to Sakhalin, the Chinese and Korean borders, Arctic Circle, and Kamchatka.  Taking off in blizzards.  It had been an interesting twenty five years.  He knew, everyone said, he had to build a new life, find new meaning.

He had turned to art in retirement.   He is, finally, after eight years, learning to shelve ambition.  Now, he can do what he always wanted, teach American literature, Hemingway and Faulkner.   Give slide presentations on Frank Lloyd Wright and Art Nouveau.  He is also finding satisfaction by volunteering at the humane society.   Taking care of cats.   Grooming them, finding them homes.   No more pressures.  You have earned time to write and reflect and travel and learn.

What had he accomplished in all those years, bouncing along West African roads, running up hilly highways past rice paddies and Acacia trees; walking in dark Liberian villages at night where the only light came from the stars; driving through the gray bureaucratic streets of Belarus?  Walks through Old Town Havana, being followed.  The highway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and West Bank villages amid olive trees.  A kaleidoscope of cities: Nairobi, Kinshasa, Pretoria, Cairo, Nicosia, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Maputo, Johannesburg, Geneva, Kiev, Vilnius,  Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Odessa.

He is brought back to the present by a crow’s “caw.”   The cold, he realizes, is beginning to permeate his overcoat.  It is getting dark.  No moon is visible.  Walking up to his porch, he can see yellow dots, the lights of the city below, in the distance, in the north valley.  To his left, he hears a dog bark, then two dogs, large dogs, with loud barks.  Chimes from Helena Cathedral can barely be heard, a short set.   A solitary figure walks across the street, crunching the frozen ice on the sidewalk.   A car comes crunching down the street, headlight beams preceding it.  Another vehicle, a loud white pickup, an older model, meets it at the corner.  The car waits, despite the fact that the truck came later.

Looking to the north, down Harrison Avenue, he can see occasional street lights illuminating Craftsmen and Victorian houses.   Barren trees cast diagonal stripes across the pavement.  There are dark areas where there is no light.   He looks up to see if any stars are visible.  Not this time.

There had been benchmarks in his career.  At the Russian Blair house in Moscow, he had been in meetings where Shevardnadze and Baker negotiated the end to the Cold War, working out the details.  He had saluted the Russian as he walked out the back door, a personal tribute.   He had taken U.S. teams to search for MIAs in Russia.  Before Liberia fell apart, he had taken opposition leaders in a van to meet the visiting U.S. Secretary of State, picking them up all over town at street corners, in secret, against the wishes of the local government.   Later, he read in cables how they had been killed in the civil war, shot at roadblocks.  Somehow it all didn’t seem so far away or long ago.

He spends another half hour sitting on the porch in the cold, then goes upstairs to bed.  His wife is already asleep.   Fiji, his Siamese cat, crawls under the covers next to him.  She is purring, lying against his side.  He falls asleep, dreaming of Korean War aces, Sabres versus MiGs, no doubt from reading James Salter.  Early jets are gliding into position behind each other, not overshooting or losing speed at lower altitudes, avoiding the MiGs canons, pulling right and left on the shouts of their wingmen.

As he awakes the next morning, eyes closed, he is able to make out light coming in from the window to his side.   He can feel Fiji lying on his legs, on top of the covers now.  When he opens his eyes, finally, he is looking at a yellow wall.  Yellow in the morning light.  It is always nice to wake to a yellow room, bright and positive.  The light coming into the room is muted by white blinds, providing a nice feeling of shelter and seclusion from the outside world, yet knowing that beautiful hills and pines are just outside.  It is peaceful, a sanctuary.   There are noises outside, coming from the cars going by on the street.  Otherwise, the house is silent.   His wife is off to work.  Not a creak.

His back aches a bit, and he has to squirm to a more comfortable position, dislodging Fiji, who jumps down to her bowl on the floor.  He can hear her crunching her dry food, using her paw to lift one kernel at a time from the bowl, scraping it up and over the side of the bowl onto the floor, where she delicately eats it.  Five or six kernels is enough for her.  In a minute, she jumps back on top of him, sniffing his finger tips.  She is telling him, with her loud Siamese whine, that she wants a taste of coffee, her only luxury.   He obliges, dipping his finger into the cold coffee cup on the nightstand.   Putting his finger to her nose, she licks it.   As he gets up, he can feel tenderness on the soles of his feet.  There is a high pitch ringing in his ears that he always has, only noticeable when it is totally quiet and he is alone.  He ignores it now.

He stands up, enjoying the room’s aesthetic.  Pastel blue bed spread.   Monet and Renoir prints on the walls, their whites and blues prominent, women with spread out dresses in a lawn party, boaters and people dancing in the gardens, Monet’s wife Camille and Renoir’s ever present brother with derby hat.  Monet is more precise; Renoir is more impressionistic and rough, but more human.   He loves the Impressionists, Manet’s people in black evening dress, black horses with thin legs at the Longchamp track.  Pisarro’s street scenes of Paris, Monparnasse, looking down on trams and Chestnut lined avenues which capture the era.  Degas’ ballerinas, Toulouse-Lautrec’s illuminated faces at the Follies Bergiere.   On the dresser are old photographs of his mother’s family in Winterset, the uncles and aunts, no longer around, dressed in their finest, the women with white silk blouses, long pleated skirts, and button up boots.  A Persian rug covers the smooth pine floor.  Coming downstairs, he passes a leaded glass window at the bottom of the stairs, the birch trees out front showing through.  He enters the parlor, tan walls which look olive with less light, cocoa and teal sofa and chairs, Contemporary to offset the Victorian architecture.  The wooden door frames are wide, painted white.  Bay windows look out to the street on one side, the yard on the other.  Snow is on the ground.  The aesthetic is important to him.

He is lethargic, drowsy, a sign of slowing down, of aging, noticeable to him for the first time, at 61.  He sits down at the dining room table in front of the large bay windows, looking at a poster of Santa Fe on the plumb colored wall, adobe houses and juniper covered mountains in the background, red chilis hanging from trellises.  He misses the Southwest.   Helena and Santa Barbara; Helena and Santa Fe.  Not a bad life.  He looks forward to a productive and fun day, grooming cats, watching “The Ipcress File” on video, crepes at Jeff’s on the mall, another good Salter book on the mantel, “Cassada,” also about MiGs and Sabres over the Yalu.  He has read it once before.  He has seen the Ipcress File before as well.

Fiji, his Siamese cat, comes down the stairs.  He heard her feet hit the floor up above as she jumped off the bed.  She floats like a ghost through the house, razor thin and quiet, making her rounds, repeating her foray through rooms, exploring, coming back to the dining room and pausing by his chair, extending one thin brown and tan foreleg, touching his pant leg at the knee, her way of asking for approval to jump up into his lap, her bright blue eyes and chocolate and tan seal point face searching his eyes.  “Yes, it’s okay. Come on up.”  She jumps up.  He is reminded of the Dylan song, “a diplomat with his Siamese cat.”   He likes the elegance of the Siamese, their intelligence, and their absolute loyalty.   He strokes the smooth short hair along her back.  After a minute, she moves, sits up, and jumps down, but brushes against his leg in a show of affection on the way out.  The wonder of animals. The cute face and blue eyes looking up intently.  Our little companions, guardians.  Helen at the animal shelter, had recently told him that San Francisco, for some reason, was full of Siamese.  There are few in Helena.

Later, he dresses, selecting Wrangler jeans and a long sleeve knit shirt with navy blue Filson sweater, and Merrells, puts on his Yak Trax, and drives over to Birds and Beasley’s on Park Avenue, to sign up  for the local bird watching club.   As he gets out of his car, a swoon of sparrows, swoop by him, close to the car, heading off to the north.   It is chilly, perhaps twenty degrees.  He buttons his hounds tooth overcoat and rearranges his scarf tight around the neck.  A few seconds later, the birds fly back over his head the opposite direction, above the cliffs overlooking the streets, up Mt. Helena, an exact reverse course.   He is more conscious of birds now.

While adjusting his scarf, he hears a young child’s voice and slam of a pickup truck door, and sees a leashed black Labrador pup whining in the bed of a pick up.   The driver has gotten out of the driver’s side, and gone around to unfasten her daughter from her car seat.   The child is holding a doll.  As they head across the street towards the library, the mother stops at the tailgate, and lifts the daughter up so she can pet the pup.  These two, the girl and the lab, he thinks to himself, will grow up together.  What a life.  As they cross the street, the pup whines after them, staring at the library, his tail flying.  An older green Ford F-100 pickup is pulling out from the library parking lot across the street, white exhaust coming from the tailpipe like steam, showing how cold it is.

Taking a few seconds to look around at the door to Birds and Beasleys, he can see the hills above town, black birds flying high, ravens or crows, pumping their wings up and down slowly, soaring with little effort.   The cars on the street are dirty.  Two women and a young girl, cross the street to the local bakery.   They are bundled in parkas, holding hands, the girl in the middle.   A thirty-something man in pressed carpenter style blue jeans with loops, walks into the micro brewery next to Beasleys.  He has on only a medium weight jacket and baseball hat with sporting goods logo, a typical style in Montana.  A bit square jawed, blond, Scandinavian looking, intent.   A few minutes later, another mid-30s man appears, walking fast with no coat, wearing expensive cordovan pointed cowboy boots, oxford blue shirt, bolo tie, and green slacks, a businessman carrying a clipboard and papers.  Western business casual, but perhaps a bit too dressy for here.  Could be a developer turned businessman, but not dressed casual enough for that.  That would be jeans and work shirt, a bit rougher type.   Could be a business person who is also an outdoorsman.  A bit too pudgy.  Could be a politician. The legislature is in session.

Leaving the bird shop, he starts the engine, the deep rumble of German motor.  The Four Tops come on the radio, on the 60s station, soul music: “Standing in the Shadow of  Love.”  The deep voiced male, choppy words, “I give my heart and soul to you dear, didn’t I…”   He eases out the clutch as he backs out, then shifts into first, thinking of other things, of the adult education course he will be teaching, of Hemingway’s “Big Two Hearted River,” the simple fishing tale in the Michigan Peninsula, with no mention of World War I and the post traumatic stress disorder the hero is suffering from.   He thinks of the veterans of World War I, like Hemingway’s Nick Adams, or Hemingway, himself, wounded, returning home to Oak Park to find no one cares about the war.  The poor Doughboys, saving the world for democracy, who did so well and who discovered a new world of Paris at the same time, and who ended up Depression-era beggars, dispersed from Anacostia Flats and resettled in Florida with no pensions, many killed by a hurricane, others riding the rails, carrying photos of themselves as young men, wearing saucer helmets in trenches.

He turns off the radio, and finds himself humming “K-K-K- Katy.”  He turns left onto Lawrence, heading up the hill towards Harrison Avenue and home, the tires sliding a bit on the packed snow.  There, on the left, on the sidewalk between two apartment buildings, he spots a young black cat, alert amber eyes, walking home for dinner, free and happy looking.   Could it be “Godiva,” the shelter cat he was so close to, recently adopted.  It looked like her.  Godiva, who rode on his shoulder and pressed against his head, purring, as he groomed the cats at the shelter.  Godiva, who finally got a home.   He is happy for Godiva, wherever she is.  Getting her a home was more significant than anything he had done in the past.   He slows to watch the young cat go into the apartment building, and says a quiet prayer for Godiva in his mind as he drives the last blocks.