This was one of the more elaborate shrines I saw. It is on State Avenue. The piece of bare rebar above the angel once held another statue, obviously, probably of Jesus.
An angel, with an American flag in the background.
My dogs and I spend a lot of time walking on the South Side, where we all find much to interest us.
I don’t think the variety of olfactory data is any thicker on the South Side than elsewhere in town, but my dogs certainly keep busy on our strolls. With their snouts an inch or so off the ground, they move their heads from side to side like minesweepers, occasionally pouncing on a fragment of food or a scrap of unrecognizable organic matter.
There are also countless other dogs — most of them communicating vehemently from behind fences — to keep them occupied. Sometimes we encounter free-roaming dogs and once two large gray dogs leapt over their fence as nimbly as a pair of deer, but we’ve never had any fights or even unpleasantness.
While they are busy with their investigations and social affairs, I am soaking in the sights, which is what keeps me going back to the South Side.
There, more than in any other part of Billings, people tend to decorate their yards elaborately, and not just with landscaping. There is a fair amount of store-bought ornamentation, things like cheap sundials, trellises, bird baths, birdhouses and little wagons hitched to ceramic donkeys.
There are many yards with crowded displays of flowers and scarecrows, statues of gnomes, chipmunks and birds, pinwheels, glass or clay ornaments hanging from lines of string, little gurgling fountains, Christmas lights left up year-round and all sorts of rock walls, pathways and enclosures.
Other people just have a lot of stuff in their yards — bicycles, tires, file cabinets, piles of wood, garden implements, hoses, discarded exercise equipment, maybe a box spring or two.
In one yard there is a collection of old sofas grouped in a half moon around a huge old television. I think it’s a joke; I don’t think the television is plugged in. Whatever, it’s a good conversation piece.
There is one more thing I have come to look for as I wander the South Side: religious shrines and statuary. My grandmother used to have a shrine to the Virgin in her backyard, a statue of Mary about 2 feet high inside a little wooden box with a chapel-like roof, hung from a tree.
There are shrines just like it on the South Side, and countless other statues of angels and cherubs and Jesus. Sometimes the statues sit by themselves, but often they are accompanied by kitsch. I don’t sense any irony or disrespect in these cases. It just so happens that some people who like religious statuary also like yard ornaments in general, so ceramic squirrels and plastic deer end up next to religious figurines, making for an interesting mix of sacred and profane, serious and silly.
A good example of this, in my little collection of photos, is the one showing a cherub next to a statue of Mickey Mouse. Mickey is bent over, holding up or pushing back a round piece of stone. Maybe it represents the rolling away of the stone at Jesus’ tomb? I really don’t know.
And not all the shrines or statues celebrate Christianity. As you will see in the photos, there are also Buddhist prayer flags and statues of the Buddha.
My favorite in the gallery of pictures above is the photo with the statue of Mary inside an upright, partially buried bathtub. That itself is not particularly unusual, but what surrounded the Virgin was strange enough.
I first saw this yard walking with my dogs. I noticed a couple of Halloween leftovers — fiendish masks set up on stakes shrouded in black — plus an old toilet, a storm door, hanging sheets and a Santa Claus stocking cap on a pole.
I didn’t see any religious artifacts, but when I was out on my bicycle, looking for shrines to photograph, something prompted me to go back to that yard and peer over the fence — and there was Mary in the bathtub.
I’m sure I have many more such discoveries ahead of me.
