Landers

Ammi Midstokke has a flourishing love-hate relationship with misery. She opens doors to it; embraces, loathes and embellishes it; makes fun of it, ...

We get to eavesdrop on her relationships with mice, stink bugs and wasps, as well as the gophers that routinely render her garden to rubble. In one of my favorite chapters, she details how she is falling in love with her growing child all over again for different reasons than her status as a mother. She seems to be a varied and strange person in a good way. Don’t be surprised if you laugh and cry as she navigates her way to life changing epiphanies. She offers thoughtful perspectives on being a mother, wife, sister and daughter, as well as on overachieving, aging and mortality. Learning to coexist with nature outside – and inside – the cabin is a struggle if not a hoot. Ammi evolves through the years as she chronicles her devotion to living life to the fullest. I asked her (admittedly, I was prepared to beg) to grace my newspaper’s Outdoors section with a column. What a strange person she seems to be. Ultimately, a gritty 36-year-old woman was saved by the heroic efforts of her rock climbing partner, a Priest Lake search and rescue team and an Air Force helicopter crew. “There is a little tiny sliver of fate somewhere between catastrophic life-ending events and nothing happening at all,” she suggests. This is what intrigued me about her and her writing.