After 35 years in Nashville, I moved to a place where brevity is a virtue and self-reliance is simply expected. Every place has its own language. I don’t mean accents or vocabulary. I mean the unwritten rules that tell you how people see the world. I grew up in the South, where sarcasm is practically a sacrament and no good story should suffer from a shortage of embellishment.
Even the humor here has a Montana accent: direct and to the point. People here don’t waste words. They tell you what they know and leave the rest alone. We’ve been coming to this valley since the 1980s and have lived here full-time for more than seven years, long enough to know I’ll never stop learning Montana.
One of the first pieces of advice I received was, “Drive at the speed you’re comfortable slamming into the ditch at.” Direct and to the point, particularly in winter.
Our tiny town used to consist of a post office and a combination bar and restaurant. Then the bar burned down. That left the post office as our social center, where neighbors catch up on the news, solve the world’s problems, and occasionally create new ones.
