Grief has made me notice the landscape differently this year. The way fields glow almost electric after rain. The way blossoms hum with bees. The way our short summer demands that we pay attention. It’s a reminder that growth and loss are not opposites; they arrive wrapped together.
Summer in Gallatin, Madison, and Park counties has a way of insisting on life. The hills are suddenly green and unapologetically lush. Rain comes and goes, the sun lingers late, and everywhere you look something is pushing up, leafing out, reaching for light.
As I write this, I’m holding both that abundance and a very personal loss. My mom, Bonnie Bibeau, died recently at 90 years old. A few months before she passed, she wrote me this about Edible Bozeman: “I finished reading the latest edition of Edible Bozeman. What an amazing publication. Gorgeous photos; well written, interesting, and timely articles. The human-interest stories show the strength, commitment, and perseverance of the people. Even allowing for a little mother’s bias your magazine is in its own league. I’m so proud of who you are and what you do.”
I’ve gone back to those lines more times than I can count. Not so much because they praise this magazine, but because they name the qualities she valued and how she lived her life. My mom learned perseverance at age 6, when her parents left a Dust Bowl farm in Texas for a new start in California. She had the drive and commitment to go back to school after raising five daughters, earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and then teaching elementary school for 20 years. She had the strength to follow passions and live her dreams, moving from city to country life and finding joy in community wherever she landed. She faced the end of her life with the same clarity and courage that defined her journey, choosing her own path. These are also the qualities that run through our local food community.
You can see them in the farmer seeding a field between storms, trusting that the soil will warm in time. In the rancher shifting practices to care for land and animals in a changing climate. In the baker up before dawn, the brewer experimenting with new grains, the young grower taking a risk on a leased acre and a used tractor.
All our issues are full of these stories—of people leaning into their place, their craft, and one another. They are not stories of ease. They are stories of adaptation, reinvention, and care, season after season.
Grief has made me notice the landscape differently this year. The way fields glow almost electric after rain. The way blossoms hum with bees. The way our short summer demands that we pay attention. It’s a reminder that growth and loss are not opposites; they arrive wrapped together.
Thank you for reading; for showing up for the growers, makers, and storytellers in these pages; and for being part of this community that feeds and sustains us in more ways than one. May this green, generous season bring you good food, good company, and—wherever you need it—a measure of strength.
Jackie Page
Publisher
