Marlene Haskins died peacefully on July 28 at her home on West Babcock, the same house she and Dale bought in 1992 for what she always called “a perfectly normal amount of money.” The Zillow estimate now reads like a phone number with a typo, a fact she recited at every potluck without resentment, simply as weather.

She worked thirty years in the MSU registrar’s office, remembering every student’s name and most of their mothers’. After Dale passed in 2018, she kept the garden going — tomatoes, zinnias, a stubborn patch of rhubarb that outlasted three zoning changes. The view of the M from her kitchen window filled in gradually: first a subdivision, then a mixed-use development with a cold-press juice bar she never visited but appreciated the concept of.

Her daughter, Teresa, lives in Belgrade now, in a townhouse development that used to be a hay field. Her son, Mike, is in Livingston, where the wind keeps the rents honest. Both inherited her habit of measuring distance in minutes rather than miles, and her certainty that the Bridgers look best in October light.

She leaves behind four grandchildren who call her “Grandma Bozeman” to distinguish her from the other one, a recipe card box organized by decade, and a stack of City Commission meeting agendas she annotated in red pen with notes like “still too tall” and “parking is a fantasy.”

The rhubarb is coming back strong this year.