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She is in her garden, dressed to the nines in a white golf skirt and red scoop-necked blouse and nurturing her fabulous zinnias.

She and a friend are locked out of the Missoula Manor again, back too late from the casino.

She is howling with laughter as she takes off in a golf cart with the clubs of a golfing friend who’s ready to walk off the course in frustration.

She’s coming back from a visit to Mexico tagged with the endearing nickname “Grandma Bad Ass.”

She’s laughing again, at one of her own jokes that isn’t fit to print here. “Hey, kid,” she’ll say, and off she goes.

“That one about the flea was kind of bad,” daughter Troy Magruder admits, disclosing no more.

Donna Duba was not your prototypical country clubber, though her sense of fashion was as refined as her sense of humor wasn’t.

“To look at my mom, she was very elegant looking,” said Duba’s youngest daughter, Cecelia Doty of Lolo. “You wouldn’t expect her to tell these jokes that were, uh, a little off-color.”

Duba died July 11 in Missoula after her third and briefest bout with cancer. To Doty, the image she’ll retain is that of her mother “always laughing because she said something funny.”

“Honest to God, I think everybody who met her, she just put a smile on their face and a smile in their heart,” said Renee Mitchell, a longtime friend and current Missoula city councilwoman. “When you were around Donna, you just felt so upbeat.”

It was Mitchell’s clubs that Duba heisted one day, back when Duba played 18 holes three days a week at the Missoula Country Club, which she did into her late 70s.

They were playing in a threesome, Mitchell with her pull cart, Doty and another golfer in an electric cart.

“We were all pretty competitive, and I got off to a really bad start,” Mitchell recounts. “After hooking a couple of balls into the woods and the trees, I said I was just going to leave and go to the practice range.”

Her companions wouldn’t hear of it.

“Donna grabbed the handle of my cart and away they went up the fairway, so I couldn’t quit. I had to stay and play with them,” said Mitchell. “Donna was laughing all the way up the fairway. She thought it was so cute and funny.”

The levity was catching, Mitchell allowed. She relaxed, played on and shot a decent round.

Ed Duba used to marvel at his mother’s ability to embrace new things.

“One of the big things you have to realize is she really led many different lives,” he said from his home in Phoenix.

Donna grew up in south-central Montana in the 1920s and ’30s on a remote farm outside of Columbus. She endured harsh Montana winters and long days in the field with her father and brothers, in a home with no indoor plumbing.

“She grew up to be a very rugged person,” Ed said.

Life No. 2 came after Donna met and married Jay Duba, son of a Lewistown lawyer. They raised their four children - sons, Wayne and Ed, who both live in Arizona, and daughters, Troy and Cecelia of Lolo - first in Arizona, then in Helena and, starting in 1974, at their home on Briggs Street in Missoula.

“She became the average mom in an awful lot of ways. The only difference there was her husband enjoyed hunting and fishing, so her life revolved around hunting and fishing,” Ed said.

Then came the golfing years, starting at Bill Roberts Golf Course in Helena, where Donna was a club champion. When Jay, who worked for the state highway department, was transferred to Missoula, he and Donna joined the Missoula Country Club. They became passionate about the game and the friendships it nurtured.

Hand in hand with golf was Donna’s green thumb. Zinnias, those big, beautiful things that grow in a rainbow of colors, fittingly became her “signature flower,” said Doty.

Golf and her fellow golfers became even more important to Donna when Jay passed away in 1989.

“She was just always there and always a friend,” said Betty Andrews Muralt, a member of the country club for 45 years. “You’d call her for a golf game and she was always ready to go.”

Cancer struck in 2000, first in the form of lymphoma. Treatments affected her equilibrium, and Donna had to hang up her golf clubs.

Otherwise, she didn’t skip a beat. She lived with both daughters for a time before moving into Missoula Manor on the south side of the city a couple of years ago.

“She always said, 'No, I don’t want to go to one of those places.’ But once she got in there, she absolutely loved it,” Magruder said. “She saw people who were in worse shape than she was, and I think it gave her a new zest for life.”

And her new neighbors “totally got a kick out of her,” Magruder added.

“She was just so social,” said Doty. “She needed to be where there was stuff going on. The Manor was absolutely the icing on her cake. She loved it. She called that her last hurrah.”

To the end, Donna Duba loved to get “dolled up” and hit the town with her daughters and friends, shopping, to the casinos for a little gambling, to cocktail hour for a Manhattan.

“She was a pistol. Nothing slowed her down,” said Doty.

Donna flirted with the friends of Tanen, her 16-year-old grandson, and forged a special bond with 12-year-old Hailee Doty.

“My daughter is really hard to read, really hard to get to know, and my mother constantly worked on that,” Cecelia Doty said. Donna spent her last two months back at the Doty home in Lolo and it was Hailee who became her primary caretaker.

“She did everything for my mom,” said Cecelia, her voice breaking.

A hairdresser, Cecelia picked up Donna each week from the Manor and, later, from Cecelia’s home to get her hair done.

“That was a good bonding time,” she said. “It was a big thing, going to the shop and getting her gossip and looking pretty and talking to everybody. That was one of her favorite times.”

In late July, Cecelia sent a friend to her house in Lolo to do Donna’s nails. When Cecelia got home, Donna showed off the colorful results.

“Look,” she cried proudly. “Strawberry margarita.”

Cecelia’s friend later said Donna told her, “I’m taking these with me.”

The next day, Donna Duba died unexpectedly. She was 85, said Cecelia, but she didn’t look it.

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