“Grandma, you should watch The Madison. It’s a six-part series on Paramount.”

I don’t have the Paramount app, but my granddaughter walked me through it so I could download it. Turns out, it’s a series with beautiful scenery from Montana, on the Madison River. It stars Michelle Pheiffer and Kurt Russel and despite the spattering of four-letter words that are not “love,” it was a mesmerizing experience.

I caught my breath when three deer walked on porcelain legs across the river at sunrise. How many times we had seen that on the ranch, once even watching a fawn nurse in the rushes of the John Day River. How peaceful the image.

“It’s about a woman, widowed, who had never seen where her husband went each year to a remote ranch on the Madison,” my granddaughter told me.

The protagonist is a New Yorker, and their two girls are too. Money didn’t seem to be any object – lucky them! But the widow had never seen this ranch her husband owned with his brother that he loved, never shared the sunsets or the super hatch bringing trout to the surface. Never shared a cup of coffee made in his special way. And then he dies and his family comes west and discovers this side of their husband and father that they had never shared – or known. He leaves a journal so that helps make the link from past to present. There were some moments – an airplane crash – I didn’t need to see that! And the way they dealt with a wasp nest in the privy didn’t seem to be too realistic. But I could suspend reality to infuse myself with so many moments reflective of our own experience. I gave myself permission to watch two episodes a night. And I hope it is a “first season” because I thought the ending a little weird. Nevertheless, I cried in every episode, but they were good tears. Our granddaughter did too, she said, as it brought back memories of her times when she lived with us at that remote spot seven miles from our mailbox, 11 miles from a paved road.

“The thing I thought, Grandma, was how wonderful it was that you and grandpa got to share your remote place, together. You lived those moments in real time. That woman deprived herself of the joy of sharing something so special with her husband.  And they deprived him of the joy of sharing it with them. You didn’t.”

“And I got to tell him that,” I said. “I got to say that while I had resisted making that trek, it had given me the greatest moments of my life.” I started writing there. I commuted to the reservation at Warm Springs because we were there, I helped deliver a baby there, was blessed with the presence of a grandchild on two different occasions who is a young woman now, still so important in my life. She told me that her time at the ranch was the “highlight of her childhood.” What a joy!