I'm just F-ing beside myself. You are too, right?

 

The news, the news, the news. What if we are on a rocket going backwards? Do we want the rocket to safely splash down in the 1950s, say--or do we want it to explode in mid-air? I'm asking. 

I made the mail art card above for a dear loved one. The king lying under the rock in the lower right hand corner might have been too subtle of a choice. 

Last night the wind roared for hours in Minneapolis. I've lived here in this building for 17 months. The wind last night howled like a monster and shook the things on our balconies.

This is what I see from my balcony at night. Like other things I've more or less taken for granted, it too is in the process of disappearing. A new building is going up. Every day, this vista is one day closer to gone.

This is this week's collage. When I can't follow a thought long enough to write, I cut up paper and make things.

The River

Dan Paik left this world six years ago today. 

He has not visited me in any dreams recently, but he and my mom are always with me. In the past several months my mom has had cameo roles in many dreams. 

It just so happens that this essay was published by a wonderful journal last week.

https://underthesunonline.com/wordpress/2020/the-river/

Tonight.

This is my neighborhood. Lilacs blooming in the foreground. Boarded up businesses in the background.

Rumors abound here. People are tense.

But some facts are abundantly clear:
George Floyd was brutally murdered.
Many other African-Americans  have been wrongfully killed by white police. Here in Minnesota and in every state of our country. For years. For decades. For 450 years.

It seems there are people here, local or otherwise, intent on causing mayhem. And there has been mayhem. You've seen the pictures.

But there has also been peaceful assembly of thousands of people. Thousands. Of peaceful people, mourning and demanding change. Remember that.

Those thousands of people want the arrest of the other three officers who helped murder George Floyd.

I'm hoping for the best. In so many ways.

If you pray, pray for Minneapolis. Pray for the United States of America. Pray for change.

"It's not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist. --Angela Davis

Song for a Ruined City

Mill City Ruins

In its earliest incarnation of white settlement, Minneapolis was a logging boomtown. One of the first saw mills in the area was constructed just across the river from the ruined flour mill in this photo. White pine was king, and the hardwood forests in southern Minnesota and neighboring area was once a vast wilderness of over 5,000 square miles. Prior to the 1800s the population (probably this count is white people?) was a mere 5000 souls.

Then came opportunity. Money to be made. People flocking to jobs. The largest raft of timber ever floated down the Mississippi was 5,500,000 feet of timber in 1902. Imagine it. What once stood tall, leveled. Gone. The supply of timber was thought to be inexhaustible then.

I read somewhere (back when I took long walks, lingering to read things) on an informational placard in my river neighborhood about how dangerous logging was. Legs were crushed or torn off. There was a booming business, not just in logging, but in artificial legs too. Probably loggers and their legs were thought to be inexhaustible. Not long after the peak, the much prized old growth pine forests were gone. When I imagine it, I see one-legged men hobbling into taverns.

Then came flour. Minneapolis transformed itself into the flour milling capital of the world. Enough flour each day for 12 million loaves of bread. Milling flour was dangerous too. In 1878, one of the big mills exploded and killed 18 workers. But the work went on. By World War I, commercial bakeries were making 30 per cent of the nation's bread. General Mills was king. Betty Crocker was queen. In 1903 there was a labor dispute and a broken strike. Workers building a city, stone by stone. Workers risking their lives. It's an old story. A recurring theme.

Meat processing. Covid-19. Healthcare. Write this paragraph. You know how it goes.

Last night when I thought perhaps I might be losing my mind after not being able to concentrate on a single thing all day, I went for a walk despite all the runners and bicyclists who zoom by not wearing masks. And there was this red-winged blackbird, singing his heart out.

I wanted to sing too--a song for a ruined city. No theater. No music. No bars or restaurants. No museums.  People I love being exposed to the virus every day.

I love cities. I didn't see a big city until I was 17. Chicago! I thought of it as my salvation. But that's another story.

I'll eat a lot of peaches. But I  don't want to blow up my TV and move to the country. (R.I.P., John Prine.)

R.I.P. to all Covid-19 victims.

R.I.P to all of those who have left us.

R.I.P. Minneapolis.

last night's sunset

The Peace of the Wild Things in Coronaville

Turns out there's a heron rookery five miles from my condo.There's something very moving about watching herons touch one another's beaks when you can't shake another human's hand.

And here's a library in a beautiful historic building. Maybe I'll go there one day.

This a is a restaurant I meant to go to. You can have a cocktail on the ferris wheel. Or you could--you know, back in the day when people did those things.

Art in Coronaville/ day # whatever

Looking through the window into my favorite coffee shop

I went out just to look in the windows at Minnesota Center for Book Arts and Loft Literary Center. The coffee shop that's part of the complex, patronized by artists and writers, was my home away from home before the virus. Washington Avenue this evening was devoid of pedestrians (unlike the park or the Stone Arch Bridge which was probably again thronged with pedestrians, joggers, runners in groups of two, three, and four--WTF Minneapolis?) 

Anyway, there's alway a window devoted to a large piece of art at MCBA. You remember art exhibits, right?

It was very satisfying to stand at the window and read the artist's statement. "Histories are written by people," she says, and "histories are not set in stone--they can always be re-written." 

We are writing and re writing the history of the coronavirus every day. It's a tragic story, and I'm feeling grumpy about it today. How are you feeling?

The window of the gift store at MCBA

Minneapolis--as beautiful as ever.

xo

Wolves

Behind all that mesh fencing is a red fox. An urban red fox. Near the back corner of my condo building.

I'd been on the bus for a while by the time the man got on. I was in one of the senior/handicapped seats facing the center, and he sat near me in the first forward facing row. As people got on many were exclaiming about the weather since the temperature was dropping. Chit chat. I don't mind talking to people on a city bus. It's not forever. And there's this thing here known as Minnesota nice.    Which is way more complicated than it sounds, but anyway. "Did you have a good day?" the man asked me.

"I did," I said. 

"What made it a good day?" he asked.

"Good people," I said.

"Mmmm," he said, are you sure they were good? Sometimes people fool you."

"They were good," I said.

"How do you know?"

"Intuition," I said, though my intuition certainly has steered me wrong in this department more than once. 

"You got to watch out for the wolves in sheep's clothing," the man said. About this time the rowdy gaggle of addicts so high they practically had needles hanging from their arms moved past us to exit. "Look at them," the man said. "What the hell?"

They were wolves in wolves clothing. But too fucked up to be of any harm since they could barely stand. The man was right. Wolves in sheep's clothing are far more dangerous. 

I stood up to ask the driver how far east he went after the bus turns on Washington.

"Hmmm," the man said after I got my answer. "I didn't even know that was east. Look at that, I learned something from you."

"Well, I know where the sun sets," I said.

The man got off just before the bus turned. "Take it easy," he said.

The white squirrel and the moon

The moon nearly knocked me over on the way home last night. I looked up and there it was, its light transforming my condo building into a temple. I stopped and texted a friend, "Moon!"
"Sky!" he texted back.
"Yes!" I texted.
Moon, you were worthy of  all those exclamation points.

Yesterday morning's walk revealed its own amazing sight--a pure white squirrel (SO sorry about this photo--you'll have to trust that it's the snowy blur streaking between the trees) frolicking in Gold Medal Park. One of my daughters had told me recently about the white squirrel in her neighborhood. It's not that I didn't believe her, but I figured I'd have a better chance of running across a great white shark in the Mississippi.

When I got home, I asked scientist Google and found THIS. Read it. Watch the video. Go ahead, go down the white squirrel rabbit hole. And if you have a real camera and take real photos, I hope you'll post to the website. 

Here in the Land of Lakes, not quakes

waiting for the fireworks

The barometer of my body says it's in a new and different place. My hair wants to part on the other side, and I'm still lost in this curvy city by the big river. But last night I connected the place where I went out for a glass of wine with the neighborhood I live in and the neighborhood where my St. Paul condo was. Three dots on a map of a zillion dots.

I'm afraid to drive here. Don't get into the bike lane when you turn, and watch out for the orange cones, orange cones, orange cones. There are giant potholes and trenches in the interstates (don't say freeway) from all the construction. And don't say the 94 or the 35W. Here you just take plain 94 or 35 W to wherever. And let's not talk about the W. Anxiety ramps up in the car like it did after the divorce when I marooned myself in my condo in South Pasadena, going to almost nothing. But I can walk or take the train. My new (to me) red Subaru has been christened Freiya, and I will drive her...eventually.

The sky is bigger and bluer here. Sky is distinctly separate from clouds. No grey linty what-is-what sky. Storm clouds barrel in every other night or so, and  lightning unzips the darkness. The 5th floor is a very satisfactory height from which to view the drama.

There is free yoga in the park before the farmer's market. Two seconds lying on the grass and I'm five years old because it smells like childhood. (That's me bottom right.)

The produce in the farmers' market cascades into more variety every week. First it was only asparagus and rhubarb and peonies. Then morels and bok choy. Now squash and lettuce, lettuce, lettuce, green beans, new kinds of spinach, gooseberries and red currants, and so much more.

A huge crowd came to fireworks along the river. Standing room only by the moment of showtime,and then bound in by rows and rows of people. It  sounds terrible, but it wasn't. The next morning it was all cleaned up even though they said 75,000 people came.

My living room still has its wall of boxes of books, and file boxes strewn with things I'm too lazy to file because it means bending down or lifting the box. And the TV is on a card table, but my bedroom is perfect with my favorite art hanging above the bed. And there's my desk where maybe the muse can find me if I ever sit down there.

Sometimes the morning light makes the view look like a painting. I see beauty everywhere, but I miss my friends. I wish they were here in the land of lakes instead of the land of quakes.

The Scottish Story

It's hard to focus on the  personal day-to-day in the midst of current political ass-hattedness and the resulting stream of heartbreaking news.  I feel single-minded and somewhat selfish as I go through these post-move days, shopping for picture hooks and towel bars and shifting things around from here to there and back. I'm not in the streets protesting anything these days. I'm not even in bed, protesting my own exhaustion--which is probably where I should be. Instead, I'm on a tear to get things done--to make yet another trip to Target, the hardware store, or to the recycling bin in the parking garage so I can deposit another load of cardboard.

Today, I decided I would find the perfect sideboard. I esty-ed. I e-bayed. No luck. In my mind's eye, I could see it. I just didn't know where to find it. Then, there it was on Facebook Marketplace in a town 50-something miles away that happens to be very near where I went to college decades ago. After exchanging messages with the seller, I drove off with a friend, hoping we'd measured correctly and the thing would fit in my car.

Turns out the sellers were selling because they're downsizing for a move to a traditional cottage in the Irish countryside. The sideboard belonged to his grandmother. The piece is Scottish, as she was. "I have thing for Scottish antiques" I told the wife.
"Me too," she said, without missing a beat as she elbowed her Scottish husband. I told them my heritage was half Scottish. And then, I don't know how it even came up, but it turns out the wife is on the faculty at the tiny college I attended all those years ago. Life is filled with weird luck sometimes.

I'm grateful for it. And for the blue skies here. And for peonies as big as dinner plates. And for the skyline that lights up my nights.

Mill ruins and stone arch bridge

Coral peonies from the farmer's market

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Minneapolis!

Ruins--Did you know that flour dust is more explosive than gun powder? 

One of the reasons Minneapolis is know as the Mill City

Nature, co-exsiting with the city

The beautiful Hennepin Avenue Bridge

Many bridges--they say that if the river is calm at night the reflection of this bridge in the water looks like a giant cat's eye.

Fine food--there's a lot of it in Minneapolis.

Three one-eyed creatures at a tiki bar

And the food here at Psycho Suzi's was great!

Besides eating and drinking, I reconnected with friends, went to wonderful bookstores, saw a lot of art and some great theatre.

Of course I went out on the river and a lake.

View from the Mississippi Queen

Feeling like the queen of Lake Jane
(Photo taken by a friend who had her phone in a zip-lock bag for safekeeping)

 And for some reason, I did not cry on the plane ride home.