I drove past the corner of Mendenhall yesterday and noticed that the gravel lot where the community used to leave their trucks is now a four-story structure with glass railings. It is a very nice building, I suppose. It has a name that sounds like a type of lichen and a lobby that smells faintly of expensive essential oils.

My neighbor, Harold, who has been driving the same Ford since the Carter administration, tried to park there to pick up a loaf of bread. He spent twenty minutes staring at the automated kiosk before giving up and driving home to Belgrade. He told me later that he didn’t mind, because he didn’t really need the bread that badly anyway.

It strikes me that we are losing the spaces where things used to be allowed to be messy. A gravel lot is a humble thing; it doesn’t ask for much, and it certainly doesn’t require a smartphone application to exist for forty-five minutes. You could park your horse trailer there, or your muddy Subaru, and nobody would look at you like you were a piece of litter.

Now, everything seems to require a specific purpose. If you aren’t consuming, or working, or “curating a lifestyle,” there isn’t much room left for you to just sit in your truck and look at the Bridgers. I asked a young man in a very clean vest if he knew where the overflow parking had moved to. He told me it had moved to the “conceptual phase” of the city planning committee.

I suppose that is where most of our town is living these days. I miss the dust on my windshield.

Phyllis Grainbelt has lived in the Gallatin Valley her entire life and remembers when the Co-op was just a co-op. She does not elaborate on what this means.