Mavis “Mav” O’Connell was born in Livingston on March 14, 1947, in the house her grandfather built from railroad ties and stubbornness. She never left, not even for college, though she took a correspondence course in bookkeeping from a school in Chicago that she completed at the kitchen table. She worked the counter at the Park County Clerk’s office for forty-two years, where she knew every deed, every variance, every property line by heart.

In 1989, the city told her the garden shed behind her house on 4th Street was three inches over the setback. She spent the next thirty-one years attending every Planning Board meeting, always in the second row, a manila folder of surveys on her lap. The shed still stands. The setback was eventually adjusted, though no one at the city will say it was because of her.

She watched the M on the hillside go from a white rock outline maintained by volunteers to a landmark half-hidden by rooflines creeping up the foothills. Her two sons moved to Belgrade in the nineties, where the math still worked. They visit every Sunday with grandchildren who call Livingston “the windy place.”

She kept a ledger of every property sale on her block, written in pencil so she could erase the prices when they stopped making sense.

The wind will still blow through the shed’s loose boards.