"Big Sky Country" and "Certain Women"

       It was after we came home from the movie "Certain Women" today, in which the background was consistently Montana's ever-present outdoors, that the term "Big Sky Country" came back to me.

       Yes, it is an appellation often given to Montana, and it felt right, having never been through the state and seeing it here for about the first time.  Flat, flat plains, mutiply-mountainous terrain, open, open skies.  ("Montana" is from the Spanish for "mountainous.")

       If you know people from Montana or of them on TV or film, there's a certain sturdiness, stoniness, as though they'd been steeped in that country and felt the imposition of that land and those skies.

       Perhaps the four different women in this movie, each living lives quietly, steadily, but somewhat impassively, yearning yet lonely, are echoing these very surroundings.