Clementine “Clem” Vásquez died peacefully at home on July 28, surrounded by the seed catalogs she never threw away. She was 76.

Born in El Paso, Clem arrived in Bozeman in 1982 with a nursing degree and a suspicion that mountains were overrated. She stayed for the job at the Co-op deli counter, where she memorized three decades of sandwich preferences and never once wrote them down.

Clem watched the parking lot at the old Safeway become a brewery, then a condo building, then a different brewery. She called them all “the Safeway” until the day she died. Her daughter, Rosa, lives in Belgrade now, in a townhouse that cost more than Clem’s first house on South Third. Her grandson, Mateo, attends MSU and insists the M Trail is “content.”

She never learned to parallel park on Main Street and considered this a personality trait rather than a deficit. The Planning Department still has her handwritten letters about the 1998 shed ordinance filed under “V.”

She kept a jar of dried Hatch chiles above the stove and refused to believe winter lasted longer than three months.