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  • elegy in green

    The last safe place is getting packed into cardboard.

    I run my fingers along the frame of the window in the dining room—the one that looks out onto the gravel-dusted front yard where a stubborn Oregon grape root plant grows. He wasn’t a gardener, but there was something poetic about that hardy, jagged bush surviving all the suburban attempts to tame it. This townhouse sits tucked in the stillness of Centennial, nestled mid-row between two others, three stories tall and just over 1,500 square feet. Grief doesn’t echo here—it settles between drywall and shared beams.

    The late June wind sighs through the screen with that same high plains exhale: dry, cold, relentless. It doesn’t caress; it scrapes. And yet, somehow, it sings. That sound has always reminded me of a cello played with a knife.

    This house smells like old cupboards and dusty carpet. It carries ghosts in the baseboards and secrets in the attic insulation. I used to imagine this place was a heart with four chambers: the den where he died, the basement where I stacked grief like firewood, the hallway where I paced every night with my dog Angel crying over probate emails, and the garage full of tools I never learned to use. I stayed because I was trying to keep something alive. But it turns out you can’t resuscitate a myth.

    They stopped speaking to me. One took the cat. Another said I’m dead to him. What am I supposed to do with that kind of silence? It thickens, curdles, then hardens around the edges of a life. And still, somehow, I keep feeding it my attention, as if love can be coaxed from absence.

    I move the last box onto the floor, next to Angel’s food bowl. She’s watching me, three-legged and wide-eyed, always sensing the unspoken before it becomes sound. Her fur still smells like vet bandages and cedar mulch from the yard we never got to plant. There was going to be a garden here. There were going to be sunsets watched from the porch. There was going to be a lease, a deed, a dream with a date stamp. Instead, there was only the grind of maintenance and the slow death of inheritance.

    I keep thinking about his voice, the way he used to speak about Atman and witnessing the self. He was tall, wore khakis and a button-up pocket shirt with pens always tucked in the front. He drove a ’93 Camry he had painted green, not for flash, but function. A vegan Buddhist with a complicated heart, a disciplined body, and eyes that held more questions than answers.

    He built a life out of principle and breath. He sketched maps of the soul and sometimes flirted with distraction. But he showed up. For his students, his practices, his routines. Now what’s left is brittle paperwork and a war of emails. The home became a battleground where no one showed up for the funeral but everyone arrived for the scraps.

    When I lie in bed at night, I replay the funeral playlist in my head. Boston. Jethro Tull. That one track with the flute solo that sounds like a rebellion unfolding in real time. that always makes me ache in a way I can’t quite name. It plays over the hum of the oxygen concentrator that still echoes in my memory, as if the walls haven’t realized he died.

    And now I’m moving back to Wyoming, not for the state but for the space. For the sagebrush that curls like old calligraphy across the hillside. For the wind that tells the truth whether you want it or not. For the chance to build something of my own that isn’t just a response to someone else’s absence.

    My new place is small, barely 500 square feet, but it’s mine. I’ll have a yard for Angel, a quiet for my work, and a foundation that doesn’t shift under someone else’s name. I’ll keep the loveseat and the bed. I’ll leave the piano and the rage.

    This isn’t healing in the traditional sense. I still feel the rot beneath the crown. But it’s forward motion. It’s the muscle memory of hope. It’s the body remembering how to want.

    I will not assist in the sale of this house. I will not pretend that what happened here was neutral. I will not sanitize the story to make it more palatable for people who chose to stay away until it was time to collect. Let the court see what the wind already knows: that a storm left unchecked will tear down more than just shingles.

    This house was once a haven. Now, it is an elegy.

    And I am the one who will write it.

  • wyoming isn’t your metaphor

    I’m a fifth-generation Wyomingite, currently stuck in Denver, CO tying up some family mess. It’s not permanent. I’ve got a lease on a 500 square foot hovel in Laramie, WY, not far from where my great-grandparents are buried. About 60 miles east, the town of Carpenter still carries my great-great-great grandpa’s name. I’m not coming back for nostalgia, and I’m sure as hell not coming back to write commentary. I’m coming back because roots mean something here and mine aren’t decorative. They’re a promise.


    WyoFile, on the other hand, claims to be committed to Wyoming while publishing work that
    feels anything but grounded. The high plains and mountains become a distant stage set. Less a place, more a metaphor. Its stories often frame locals as symbols in national debates, not as complex people rooted in hard soil. There’s a noticeable absence of lived
    grit. No windburn, no well water, no small town quiet. Instead, it offers polished narratives that hover above the land they claim to represent.

    One such curated essay, written by Vicki Lindner for WyoFile in August 2021, is titled “Political polarization is literally killing us.” In it, Lindner recounts a visit to Laramie where she encountered a young man who was unvaccinated against COVID-19. She writes
    “I don’t think those like, ‘Bob’ … can begin to imagine the fury they create in the rest of us.”


    The fury. The rest of us. How could native New Yorker Vicki, on a trip to see a concert that she ended up ditching anyway, understand what an entire population might feel.  That language is designed to isolate and shame—not to understand or communicate. Even as a liberal leaning person, I bristle at this.  The people she’s writing about are still my neighbors. I might not agree with them, but I know better than to talk AT them. Especially if I’ve left like her.


    Lindner once had a cabin in Dubois, WY. She also lived, for a time, in Encampment, WY. And while that might lend someone a fondness for Wyoming, fondness does not equal fluency. These places, in her writing, become tokens of authenticity—proof she has earned
    the right to translate the rest of us. But her writing depicts a Wild West cowboy culture
    softened with nostalgia and sharpened into indictment when convenient.


    That’s the core problem: too much of what WyoFile publishes under the banner of liberalism doesn’t read as Wyoming liberalism at all. It reads like a coastal proxy war—one where the complexity of rural life is flattened into “backward” or “oppressed.” If you’re
    looking for progressive voices from inside the state, they’re out here,but you won’t often
    find them quoted or published.  Instead, we get the moral high ground from 5280.


    I know this firsthand. A long time ago, Lindner expressed interest in my story. At the time, I had just left Gillette, WY and was recovering from a difficult chapter in my life involving addiction. She never wrote the piece. But it quickly became clear that what interested her was not the truth of my recovery, nor the ways I had navigated family trauma, grief, and healing. What interested her was the symbolism: a person damaged by fossil fuel culture. A metaphor she could use.


    And when I didn’t serve that narrative, she moved on. That’s not journalism. That’s not advocacy. That’s extraction. This is what people get wrong about liberalism in Wyoming: it isn’t performative. It isn’t
    loud. It doesn’t wear the same cultural costume you might find in Boulder or Brooklyn.

    It’s shaped by a different set of values entirely. Quiet perseverance, lived humility, a sense of obligation to community that isn’t transactional. It’s forged in places where no one’s filming for Instagram. Where you might dig the same truck out of the same snowbank, no matter what bumper sticker is on the back.


    I don’t speak for all Wyoming liberals. But I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. I’ve spent over a decade in the field of mental health. I’ve stayed in this work even as family members died, as the systems around me failed, as I tried—without funding or support—to offer meaningful care.

    That’s what commitment looks like. It’s not romantic. And it’s not useful to
    people like Lindner, who write memoirs about Wyoming and call them movements.


    WyoFile, at its best, could be a platform for hard questions and local insight. But lately, it feels more like a filter—a place where stories are polished to match a worldview, not
    presented in their raw, necessary complexity. There’s too much signaling. Not enough listening.


    If you want to support Wyoming liberalism, you have to respect how it looks and sounds here—not how it scans from elsewhere. That means acknowledging the people who never left, who kept working, who are trying to change systems without scorning everyone in
    them. It means telling stories that don’t flatten us into metaphors for your politics.


    We don’t need more writing from a safe distance. We need people who know the wind, carry the silence, and stay when the story stops being useful. That’s the kind of voice Wyoming deserves—and the one you keep missing