Theresa ’tess’ Braided Hair was born in the house on West Babcock that her grandfather built with logs from the Bridgers. She did not leave Bozeman except for a stint at Haskell Institute in the sixties and even then she came back on weekends. She worked at the Co-op for thirty-eight years, back when it was a buying club that met in the basement of the Methodist church and you had to case your own beans.

She remembered when the M Trail was just a game trail and North Nineteenth was gravel all the way to the interstate. She remembered when the house next door sold for twelve thousand dollars and when it sold again for four hundred thousand and when the condo tower went up where the Johnson place used to be. She did not say much about any of it. She just kept putting up her tomatoes and driving her 1998 Subaru to the senior center on Tuesdays.

Her daughter June lives in Belgrade now, in a townhouse that cost more than Tess’s first mortgage. Her grandson Marcus is in Billings driving truck. They visited every Sunday for fry bread and the stories Tess told without telling — the way the light hit the Bridgers in October, the sound of the irrigation ditch in June, the winter the power went out for three days and the whole block cooked on camp stoves in the street.

Services will be held at Dahl Funeral Chapel on Saturday at 10 a.m.