The year before my mother died, we gathered sky memories. It began one day when I saw a car from Montana with "Big Sky" on the license plate.

"Is the sky bigger in Montana?" I asked my mother.

"Hmm," she said, thinking. "It's probably that they have fewer hills and buildings, so you can see more of it. But our sky is wonderful, too."

"It looks pretty regular to me," I said, looking up at it. "What's so wonderful about it?"

"It's wonderful because it's always changing. Sometimes it's beautiful-wonderful and sometimes it's scary-wonderful and sometimes, like now, it's just regular-wonderful."

I wasn't convinced.

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