|
September | 2025 When we moved to Red Lodge in 2012, we had only been here four months when our oldest child who was only six was hospitalized — three and a half weeks in Billings, while our youngest, just four stayed home. We didn’t know many people yet. But the community showed up anyway. A giant Snoopy and Tweety Bird appeared on our lawn. Elle was invited to bake cookies, to spend afternoons in workshops and kitchens. People opened their doors and their hearts without asking us to prove anything. No one cared what we believed or where we came from. We were simply a family in need, and Red Lodge answered. Ten years later, in 2022, the flood came. It followed a hard year, but when the waters rose, all that fell away. Neighbors filled sandbags, cooked meals, mucked out basements, and cared for one another without hesitation. In the middle of chaos, Red Lodge remembered itself. Over the years I’ve seen this town rally again and again — meals dropped off when someone was sick, kids cared for when parents couldn’t be there, shoulders leaned on in quiet moments of grief. These small acts rarely make headlines, but they shape lives. They lift burdens and remind us that we don’t have to carry things alone. That’s the thread of humanity that has carried us before, and it’s what gives me hope now. Still, I can feel how slippery things have become. So much energy in the world around us is going into shouting, into trying to win arguments, instead of into one another. Social media makes it worse — every word like a stone thrown in a glass house. But I don’t think the answer is silence. Our voices matter. The question I keep coming back to is this: Are we putting more energy into sustaining anger, or into trying to build a foundation for trust and community? I still get pulled toward the chaos of social media, still catch myself wanting to shout into the void. But I’m learning, slowly, to pause — to ask where my energy is going: toward anger or toward care, toward division or toward connection. I stumble plenty. But I keep trying. Because real change begins with trust. And trust doesn’t come from shouting — it comes from connection. From remembering the person in front of us before the beliefs they carry. From remembering that we belong to one another, even when we disagree. I don’t have the answers, but I’ve witnessed what happens when this community shows up. It feeds people, holds kids, shovels walks, checks in on neighbors. That spirit has been here all along. And maybe that’s where it begins: with the courage to ask — how do we have a conversation? How do we remember the thread of humanity between us? How do we keep living into the kind of community Red Lodge has already shown it can be? xoxo,
Kat
|
