Distinctly Montana Magazine

The Lovebird Excerpt from Margie Fitzgerald is a sensitive, spirited college freshman, a loner on a colorful quest for love and connection. When she falls under the spell of a charismatic, tortured professor and joins his ragtag group of animal rights activists, she seems to have found a channel for her abundant empathy and previously undirected passions. But Margie takes her activism too far, and eventually finds herself in trouble with the law. She flees her paradisial Southern California home for the very foreign Crow Reservation in Montana, where a family has agreed to hide her. There, she begins to reconcile her past with her present, and make unexpected discoveries about her heart. Margie also finds a friend in Granma, one who affirms some of her own feelings about the natural world. Granma wanted to go out and gather chokecherries. "It's been hot," she said, "and the baáchuutaale are ripening. I saw some the other day, like pretty round rubies." She took up her flour sack. We weren't far past the chickens when she began pointing out all kinds of plants we could eat, growing right under our feet. "There's burdock," she said. "And over here is some Indian lettuce—those thunderstorms and all this heat have made everything so lush for us—here, try a dandelion." Granma broke the spiky yellow flower from its stem and held it to my lips. I opened my mouth for the bloom. It tasted like its color—bright and sweetly tart. "Mmm, not bad." "We'll get some of these greens on our way home and make a salad with them tonight." "It's really wonderful," I said, "that all this is here." "I know," Granma replied. "Can't you feel her throbbing in every living thing?" The fuzz on my arms rose. "Who do you mean?" by Natalie Brown "Your mother," she said, looking straight ahead. "And mine." I was quiet. I knew Granma didn't mean her own birth mother, who had been lost to her, or my Rasha of the red poppies, of whom I'd never spoken. "This is what I've been knowing you would understand, honey," Granma continued. "It's why I wanted you to come stay with us, and to come with me on these walks. When I heard about you and what you were doing with the animals, I wanted to share it with you. Share her with you." I remembered the tendrils of the gourd vines that had grown in the Community Garden where I'd sat during many mournful Middletown nights, how they had reached out so intelligently toward what was nearest to them and coiled themselves around it in the most accurate of embraces. I considered my lifelong Mary musings—the tendrils might have been strands of Mary's hair. And now Granma was talking about a "her"—a mother who throbbed in every living thing. Natalie Brown grew up in Orange County, California. She earned a BA in Literature from the University of California at San Diego, and master's degrees in English and Native American Studies from Montana State University. She lives in Montana. The Lovebird is her first novel. Copyright © 2013 by Natalie Brown. Reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. DISTINCTLY MONTANA Gal 13 FALL | 2 0 1 3

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