Landing On Cloudy Water

The Geography of Sentences

2012-02-26T16:39:00.001-06:00

Two years ago I reread one of my favorite books, Love Medicine by Minnesota writer Louise Erdrich, and shortly thereafter began writing the essay that would become my MFA graduate lecture. I called it "The Geography of Sentences." I examined word-nerdy terms like syntax. I referred to the psychological ways we react to beautiful phrases and why. And I ended up with a dozen pages that meant something meaningful to me.

I've read The Writer's Chronicle for as long as I've been a serious student of writing, so it is an immense honor to open up its March/April issue and find my essay there. Feeling a bit out of my league, to tell the truth. But happy, too. And reflective. There are so many paths we can take, and today I'm just grateful that mine has led me here.

Frost

2012-02-15T09:04:00.001-06:00

The Winter It Didn't Snow

2012-02-02T16:00:00.005-06:00

The winter it didn't snow,

I lost two pairs of slippers.

I stood in steaming showers.

I left the blinds broke-open after dark.

The winter it didn't snow,

I peeled and crunched on carrots.

I trailed a hawk out hunting.

I practiced yoga, cat and cowed, pigeon-toed.

The winter it didn't snow,

I met the sunrise, sunset.

I listened to those engines.

I tended potted plants with faith and fuss.

The winter it didn't snow,

I scribbled a.m. hope notes.

I remembered California.

I found myself entranced again with techno.

The winter it didn't snow,

I held my love like hunger.

I warmed my feet along him.

I dreamt of us as children, us as grey.

The winter it didn’t snow,

I touched the fine lines forming.

I finally took my vitamins.

I tried to hush my mind, to let it slow.

The winter it didn't snow,

I wanted truth. But vastness.

I wanted peace. But Future.

I sought simplicity, the cool white sky.

The winter it didn't snow,

I waited for that foot fall.

I waited for that banner.

But as each month passed on, it whispered, No.

So, the winter it didn't snow,

I curled my breath each morning.

I studied frost like scripture.

I waved, Hello Moon, my dear shy friend.

The winter it didn't snow,

I made promises on car rides.

I laughed into my muscle aches.

I failed. I cried out. And I tried again.

Sagatagan at Sunset

2012-01-22T10:51:00.002-06:00

Over the Shoulder

2012-01-11T21:35:00.000-06:00

Yesterday it was spring. 55', my coat open, the light bright, my eyes searching the sky for songbirds. I stepped from one place to the next stretching into the backs of my legs, noting the way the flat grasses caught the pads of my feet like gifts. I tipped my face up. I tipped my face west. I followed the sun with my body, even when it was behind me.

Just days before was a different year. How quickly that happened. There was wind from the north, tight tangles in my hair. I opened my mouth each morning, willingly. Fresh cold. Acorns and firesmoke. I tilted my ears to the sound of everything that had already been said.

Beyond that, a hundred days sway dipped in amber. Each fine and tender. Wide to the touch. What can I say of them except that they are nouns.

Who are you, daughter of myself? Cradle of this life now living? Slight bones and skin that have since gone, that have since flitted off into winds and suns and night times of good and bad aching, I look for you, wondering.

Yesterday, a January Tuesday, was spring, open and guessing names. Today I skate arms out across a mirror of ice, silver and stinging, and I twist and I twist, trying to see behind in time to glimpse the turn, the flip, that has brought me here, unfurled.

Promises and Wishes

2012-01-01T09:39:00.000-06:00

Dear Military Service Member,

2011-12-21T01:01:00.005-06:00

I have a deep need to do two things: call you by a name (Sam, Margo, Mario, Tianyi) and picture you in a specific place (West Texas, North Carolina, Afghanistan). But I'm able to do neither. You are someone I don't know, someone in some where I have probably never been. But I feel the reality of your life just as sure as I feel these keys under my fingers, and it's a bit miraculous to understand that what I'm about to say will reach you, whatever letters it takes to make up your name.

Let me start here: I'm Emily. I live in Carver County, Minnesota. On the green couch where I write now, I have a view through the window of the night stretched before me, and it's an inky black, liquid in the way the wind pushes it in all directions. The clouds hang low and thick, so no glimmers from stars or moon slip in. Tomorrow is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Details like this always make me pause and wonder about tides and dormancy and long and short shadows and the other side of the world. I can't help looking for some significance.

In the morning, the light will sift through the clouds and lay thin fingers on our strange December. Last winter at this time, Minneapolis had had almost forty inches of snow, and I'd already taken frigid, awkward walks in too-big-for-me boots. But yesterday I still selected my autumn coat and chose my scarf by color, not warmth. There is no snow here, only brown grasses, still green in some places, that when walked on feel hard as stone. I wear small, thin shoes, and feel the earth tightening beneath me.

Do you know what I mean?

When the first real snow comes, it will cause traffic jams and spin outs and missed meetings. Fingers will shrink with the cold, cheeks will pink at the wind's bite, and there will be cursing on every street. But I keep thinking that the white will also be widely welcomed, embraced even by those with long driveways, because of the wait. The wanting. The wonder over what has kept it away, all those reasons that are each little stories of other lives.

You know?

On Friday I will drive through county after county, up Interstate 94, past hundreds of acres of furrowed fields, dusty with dry soil, toward my parents' home. I will look for hearty birds. I will scout out signs of deer inside stands of grey woods. I will watch the sky shift above me, holding out handfuls of blue, and I will think of you. I will wonder where you are this Christmas. I'll imagine, if not your face, then your feet, the weight of your boots, the way they hit the ground, if that ground gives a little.

You are walking somewhere I don't know, perhaps somewhere that you haven't known yourself for very long. And really, it is miraculous, because in a way you are walking that path for me. For so many people who will never know if it snows outside your window or if there's heat, if you like one or both, what the night looks like to you when you stare into it, or the letters of your name. For people who will only be able to say thank you like this.

*** My creative writing students wrote letters to servicemen and women yesterday. Tomorrow I'll send them to A Million Thanks, an important organization that--regardless of your beliefs about defense--passes on bits of encouragement and appreciation, something we all deserve. Join us? Happy holidays, everyone! ***

To be of the Earth

2011-12-20T07:37:00.001-06:00

To be of the Earth is to know
the restlessness of being a seed
the darkness of being planted
the struggle toward the light
the pain of growth into the light
the joy of bursting and bearing fruit
the love of being food for someone
the scattering of your seeds
the decay of the seasons
the mystery of death
and the miracle of birth.

-- By John Soos

The Backcountry Journal

2011-12-05T09:07:00.001-06:00

New Reader/Follower/Bookmark Alert, especially for those of you with a penchant for the outdoors:

Editor Ben Smith was kind enough to include my essay "Winter, Walking" in the early stages of The Backcountry Journal, a wonderful online composite of place-inspired words and images. There's great stuff here: hiking, fishing, hunting, exploration. Do hope you check it out. And hope you're enjoying the snow!

Roadside Poetry: Look Back

2011-11-23T09:23:00.006-06:00

Many thanks to Roadside Poetry's organizer, Paul Carney, and my mom, ever the intrepid photographer. Happy Thanksgiving, all!

San Carlos, Costa Rica

2011-11-18T09:24:00.002-06:00

You said it was a twelve-house town. Did you call it town? No sé. You’ve been speaking in English and I’ve been attempting Spanish and there are details we’ve lost to effort, that we’ve grinned over, our hair flying around us in time to the bus’s bumps along the narrow road, the thick air coming in the open windows.

“I grew up here, just around here. There were twelve houses and a soccer field. Very peaceful.”

“Paz,” I say.

You smile.

“See that?” You’ve been pointing out the agricultural fields as we pass them, a serious job as they’re everywhere, on the right and the left, stretching for kilometers. Coffee. Plantains. Cassava. Hectares of pineapple. You described how volcanic ash has enriched the soil, how the area is flush with large ranches and small family fincas. As we’ve traveled, I’ve watched men with machetes at their hips, some slashing their silver blades in strong strokes mere meters from the road.

“See that? Sugar cane.”

“Azúcar,” I say.

You smile again, amused. Engaged. Wanting to explain things.

“You’ve heard of the fer-de-lance?”

My next breath is quick. I swallow it. Picture brown and black triangle markings, a poisonous bite.

“Snake,” I say. “Muy peligroso.”

You nod. “Exactly.”

The fields blur past. You consider them, lines forming at your eyes. In their edges I see your tio behind a mud-covered wheelbarrow, your papa on a yellow bicycle toting his tools to the fields in the bike’s front basket. Early mornings. I wonder, watching you, how old you were the first time you found calluses on your hands.

“They’re in the cane,” you say. “The snakes. They feed on the rats that live there. So before harvest we burn the fields. Part of the crop is lost, but it’s the better choice.”

A square cemetery full of white stone tombs approaches and recedes. You cross yourself, kiss your thumb.

To the west, I watch the Arenal Volcano steaming. Its puffs of vapor rising and swirling above the rainforest engulf the distant landscape. Closer, below my window in a fenced-in yard, brothers—one-bare-chested, both barefoot—kick a soccer ball between them. Their sister swings in a hammock with a dog and sends text messages on her cell phone.

I glance back at you. Your gaze has moved to the tops of trees, scouting for sloths and orange iguanas.

“See that?” you ask.

I imagine you as a boy, lingering at the end of your mother’s driveway, a cluster of other boys circling you, a soccer ball on your hip, describing the snake you found yesterday in the closet, the way your mother screamed and yelped for you, the way you knew what to do with the broomstick and the backyard and all that jungle.

“See that?”

We are through another twelve-house town, over another one-lane bridge, under another rain-heavy cloud, surrounded by green upon green upon green—this country you’ve laid out for me.

“Sí, David,” I say, nodding, careful to pronounce the “v” as a “b.”

Puesta del Sol

2011-11-04T09:42:00.000-05:00

Of All The Places

2011-10-26T09:29:00.000-05:00

When I was younger, I used to believe that out of everyone I knew, I was the only one who not only appreciated nature, but loved it, pined for it, understood it as a perfect part of life. I talked to the trees. Yes, I was one of those. I could spend hours by myself in the woods, or by a stream, or watching the light shift across the surface of a lake. My first memory is of a mountain landscape in Montana, the feeling of the wind rushing up my legs, the blueness of the sky.

I began this blog for several reasons, but it was naive to not count among them connection with other "place people." I didn't know. I didn't even guess that fifteen months from its inception, this blog would have introduced me to complete strangers who now feel like friends, and friends who are now ever-more-deeply that because we've had cause to discuss and share about things that before just somehow never came up. I didn't know that what I'd most appreciate a year later about this space was not the essays or the plant names or the adventures: it would be the community. The understanding that I am not the only one, of course. There are thousands, millions, of hearts that quicken at the same things, and they have been beating alongside mine all along.

My goal at the outset of this blog was to write consistently for one year. Then, to keep going until I'd tackled my Thirty Before Thirty list. I stepped into my thirties this past month. Now what? I'll change the Thirty Before Thirty tab to Life List (I'll get to the Soudan Mine one day). I'll add a few new changes to About Me. And then I'm going to stop holding myself accountable here, at least in the same way. I'll still write posts, certainly, but only when I must, when I've been alone in the woods too long even for me and I need to reach out.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to every reader, commenter, and thinker that has entered this space. It's so good to be a student of the world, and so nourishing to be one among friends.

He Says Goodnight Like This

2011-10-19T10:37:00.000-05:00

"I Knew"

2011-10-13T10:47:00.000-05:00

that night we lay on air
sultry as an Egyptian's exhale.

Nothing stirred but firefly wings
and our gentle fingers, figuring

at the throb and pulse that electrified
such small bodies with sparks.

Their glimmer laced the lake's edge
like a necklace, like lookout smoke,

and we drifted tranquil within, at peace
with each other, our unwearied lips.

The water was blue-black beneath us,
a veiled mirror underneath the cloak

of sky, light discovering light
only when we moved.

-- by Emily Brisse,

originally published in The Talking Stick,

Vol. 20, Editor's Choice award

Prairie Oaks Institute

2011-10-11T08:22:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Chris Johnson, the Center for Servant Leadership at Gustavus, and the amazing and beautiful Prairie Oaks Institute in Belle Plaine for an incredible weekend: retreat, rejuvination, reflection, and old and new friends--"live encounters," every one.

Where We Go

2011-10-03T16:15:00.000-05:00

When I was in fifth grade, the rough kids went out behind the middle school building, down to the footbridge that crossed over the stream, and smoked beneath it. I have memories of their black-leather-clad backs, their furtive glances before they’d duck under and step down on the rocks. Later my brother and I would find the stubs of their cigarettes, muddied and stained with red-lipstick. We often wondered, when we sat beneath the bridge ourselves, if their pack would ever show up when we were there, drop from the trail like a thick cloud, and surround us in their haze and age.

The last time I was in my hometown, I returned to the stream. It had been years, maybe, since I’d walked the banks, strolled with my hand out, tapping the chest-high grasses and small sunflowers, blazed though the mass and tangle to the water’s edge just like my brother and I had done during so many days in my childhood. It threw me, as I should have anticipated, to see how changed it all was, how grown-over and wild. Still, when I ducked beneath the bridge’s new wood, its sturdier structure, I glanced over my shoulder, licked my lips, and caught myself peering for cigarettes among the rocks.

I found one, wedged just so between two dry stones. But I considered it and its subsequent memories for as long as it takes to toss a pebble into the water, as long as it takes that pebble to sink. My thoughts skimmed on to the boyfriends I’d led to that bridge, the way we sat not under but on top of it, our backs against the wood, our legs dangling off its edge into air that was, for us, spectacularly open. Our whispers and bursts of laughter filled up the evening sky with simple, warm breath. I remember leaning toward one boy, right before a kiss, and whispering, “I am so lucky.”

I didn’t know then how true that was. When I thought of the rough kids with their attitudes and bloodshot eyes, it always seemed like a life they had chosen.

Years later, days after revisiting the stream and a week or so into a new school year, I watched my students stepping into and out of my classroom in their specially-selected outfits, watched their pencils furiously filling up their journals, watched the way they wore forty bracelets on both wrists and touched each other in shy, anxious ways. It did not seem possible, did not seem even remotely realistic that such youth and optimism could be connected to anything other than the hope that they so often give me. But then there came this word, heroin, hard and ugly. And I was reminded again of teenagers who, city or not, black-leather or not, cigarettes in hand or something much stronger, have gone under the bridge their entire lives.

I’m not sure what my brother and I would have said to the older kids had they converged on us beneath the bridge. I was a protective older sister, so most likely I would have grabbed my brother’s hand and splashed through the water quickly and suspiciously away. But if I could go back. If I could grasp then what I think I understand now. I don’t know. Would I have stayed? Sometimes our own experiences are too much in our eyes to see someone else’s clearly. But tomorrow I’ll have these students in my classroom, these leather-jacket and letter-jacket kids, and so many of them just need some place to go. A bridge to walk over or under unafraid.

Peek-a-Boo

2011-09-27T10:06:00.000-05:00

Ways to Say Autumn

2011-09-23T14:16:00.003-05:00

in Latin: autumnus

n French: automne

in Italian: autunno

in Spanish: otoño

in Portuguese: outono

in Arabic: خريف

in Lakota: ptaŋyétu

in Cebuano: tingdagdag

in Somali: deyr

in Greek: φθινόπωρο

in Chechan: güire

in Thai: ฤดูใบไม้ร่วง

in Persian: پاييز

in Czech: podzim

in Finnish: syksy

in Japanese: 秋

in Chinese: 秋天

in Danish: efterår

in Dutch: herfst

in low German: harvst

in Old English: hærfest

in Icelandic: haust

Or, in Me:

haystacks

gravel-road drives

dark earth

dried herbs

acorns

bonfires

wild rice

yelloworangeredbrown

tractors and harvest time

pomegranates

warm cheese

corners of swirling leaves
morning fog
pumpkins
auburn skies
I see you, you see me
thinner trees
cheers from fields on Friday nights
warm soup
hearty bread
frost
moon all golden, so high

If I Were A Wanderer

2011-09-20T07:45:00.004-05:00

Roadside Poetry

2011-09-15T15:33:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week I lead my creative writing students through the creation of a four-line, twenty-characters-a-piece poem inspired by one of the four seasons. Why? Oh, because of this small little fantastically awesome thing that’s happening up in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, called Roadside Poetry. I’d stumbled upon RP's website and mission in August, and I immediately knew it was something I’d use in my classroom. I mean, a short poem, a challenging riddle-like form, a stretch of pavement, and four billboards? Surely one of those would get teenagers writing. It had worked for me.

The happy news is that my own submission to Roadside Poetry has been accepted for this autumn. In a few short days, the beginnings of 90,000 sets of eyes will drive past my verses and maybe, hopefully, read them, think about beauty instead of dinner, see the leaves instead of their cell phones, consider change as an image instead of a stress. Paul Carney, the coordinator of Roadside Poetry, said that he wanted people who ordinarily do not read or encounter poems to have access to moments like that. On this day, I cannot think of a more kind-hearted aim. We are all so busy, aren’t we? So burdened by finances and work pressures and family members who deserve more than we can give. A poem—a short, simple one that speaks about the natural world—can be a brief reprieve, if we let it. If we let it in.

Serendipitously, my husband and I, and all of my relatives on my dad’s side, are driving northwest in a few weeks for my cousin’s wedding. I was already looking forward to the trip. Crookston, two hours past Fergus Falls, is new country for me, and if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know that I make friends with a fresh landscape pretty easily. Now? Let’s just say October will be a good month. Paul told me the trees will be beautiful then. So I’ll take photos. Of the forests. The farms. The wide open spaces. And, you know, um, those four shiny billboards that end in my name.

:)

Tiny Dancers

2011-09-13T07:45:00.000-05:00

Landing

2011-09-06T09:58:00.001-05:00

Today I have returned to my students. I'm always surprised, after the exhaustion of spring, to discover how much I've missed them, how excited I am to be back in the classroom, teaching.

I've spent the past month preparing for the next nine, and somewhere between notes on A Farewell to Arms and rethinking my lead-in lesson on perspective, I reread the critical thesis I wrote two summers ago. I called it "Landing: A Focus on Place in Flyover Fiction." In it, I examined first place--how it's created in writing, effective techniques, etc.--and second those writers from my flyover state who seem to have a handle on such things. I wrote it as a writer for other writers. But this time, because of the headspace I was in, I read it as a teacher, and my planning from that day on changed.

Later, I read in the most recent issue of Orion Erik Reece's essay "The Schools We Need." He talked about many things, but the paragraph that stood out to me was this:

"When students learn about artists from their particular watersheds, they begin to feel their own home place legitimated, validated. Localizing knowledge makes the curriculum more relevant to students' own experience, and it can instill a sense of pride about the places where our students live. 'When I was growing up in these mountains,' wrote Kentucky novelist Lee Smith, 'I was always taught that culture was someplace else, and that when the time came, I'd be sent off to get some. Now everybody here realizes that we don't have to go anyplace else to 'get culture' -- we've got our own, and we've had it all along.'" (34)

Reading this felt a bit like a sign, some confirmation.

So, yes, I will still teach Hemingway and the research process and how to select the very best word. But this year, in every way I can, I will not just be a writer of place, but a teacher of it too. I will say, "I know you think this town is small, that this state is nothing compared to New York and California, that you and those who understand your local experiences count for so very little when held next to THE WORLD. But no. It's not true. Your voice matters. And here are a few names of other Minnesota writers who will tell you so: Robert Bly, Joyce Sutphen, Louise Erdrich, Bill Holm, Paul Gruchow, Patricia Hampl, Sigurd Olson, Jon Hassler, Lief Enger, Kao Kalia Yang, Faith Sullivan, Jude Nutter, Tim O'Brien, Sinclair Lewis, Charles Baxter, David Treuer, Garrison Keillor, Vince Flynn, Joyce Sidman, Judith Guest, Amanda Hocking, Larry Sutin, Alison McGhee, Kate DiCamillo...

Types of Clouds

2011-09-01T10:17:00.003-05:00

"At Summer's End"

2011-08-30T11:04:00.000-05:00

Early August, and the young butternut
is already dropping its leaves, the nuts
thud and ring on the tin roof,

the squirrels are everywhere.
Such richness! It means something to them
that this tree should seem so eager

to finish its business.
The voice softens, and word becomes air
the moment it is spoken. You finger the limp leaves.

Precisely to the degree that you have loved something:
a house, a woman, a bird, this tree, anything at all,
you are punished by time.

Like the tree,
I take myself by surprise.

-- By John Engels

Filigreed Fingers

2011-08-25T14:09:00.000-05:00

Backroads & Byways of Minnesota

2011-08-23T09:54:00.002-05:00

I'm all for just showing up some special where and following special whims, but sometimes--before you spend hours in a car or hundreds on accommodations--it's nice to talk to someone who has experienced a place, who can say See this and Eat here and Attend that with a degree of authority. For those of you interested in exploring Minnesota, Amy C. Rea is the woman to talk to. Not only does she write at two great blogs--Flyover Land and Wander Minnesota--but she's also just authored the guide book Backroads and Byways of Minnesota: Drives, Day Trips & Weekend Excursions. It's pretty clear: she knows her MN.

As I looked through the book, I kept thinking about the time that went into its making. Minnesota is no small state. Rea covers just about all of it in sixteen different chapters. That's a lot of driving, folks. A lot of pavement and gas stations and bad weather. But thank goodness she took the time and had her adventures, because we future travelers are the better for it. I was particularly interested in the two chapters about Lake Superior's North Shore and the one about La Crescent to Wabasha. Although I've been to the North Shore a dozen times, Rea's insights and restaurant recommendations made me realize there's a lot I've missed, and as for the Apple Blossom Scenic Drive--what have I been waiting for?

In the book's 230 pages, there's also mention of Betty's Pies, Palisade Head, Sawtooth Mountains, Father Baraga's Cross, Wild Onion Cafe, Grand Portage National Monument, International Wolf Center, Soudan Underground Mine, Waters of the Dancing Sky Scenic Byway, Kabetogama Lake, Warroad, Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, Keg and Cork, Woodtick Musical Theater, Koochiching State Forest, Nisswa Turtle Races, Nya Duvemala, Gammelgarden, Hok-Si-La-Park, Welch Village, Pickwick Mill, Slippery's, Traverse des Sioux, Heritage Tree, Wanda Gag House, Kaiserhoff, The 1898 Inn, Commonweal Theater, Birch Coulee Battlefield, Jeffers Petroglyphs, Blue Mounds State Park, and Lange's Cafe and Bakery.

Sounds a bit like poetry, doesn't it? When you read the names, don't you see something? An image? A story?

Whether you've lived in Minnesota your entire life or have never been within five states of its border, Rea makes about a thousand great arguments for fueling the car and hitting the pavement in search of its secrets. Her book has been a great reminder for me that just as the world is wide, so can a mile be off even the most familiar highway.

It Is Dusk

2011-08-18T19:42:00.000-05:00

Bird Ballad #3: ?

2011-08-16T10:43:00.002-05:00

There is that bird again, the one I've been tracking for the past few weeks with my ears. I've become so accustomed to the barn swallows and red-winged blackbirds and robins and black-capped chickadees, that this song was something new and startling when I heard it, something sweet and genuinely melodic.

Dee-dee-de-da-de-dae.

I visited the DNR's interactive bird song page, scrolled through several Minnesota bird blogs, did my best to get a peek at the quick little thing, but I haven't been able to round up a name, color, anything but those six notes.

I just went to our piano and sounded them out the best I could on the keys. Remember those mnemonic devices your piano-teaching taught when you were learning to read music? Every-Good-Boy-Does-Fine, All-Cows-Eat-Grass, Please-Somebody-Help-Me? Well, I had to stand there for a few moments before those phrases came back, but when they did, this was the language I could speak and read:

High C, high C, B, G, A, E.

Does that mean anything to anyone? If not, I'll just have to keep my safari cap on. The little guy wants to be heard, clearly. And I want to say Hey.

Look Up

2011-08-12T07:13:00.001-05:00

"Your Hands"

2011-08-10T09:00:00.005-05:00

When your hands go out,
love, toward mine,
what do they bring me flying?
Why did they stop
at my mouth, suddenly,
why do I recognize them
as if then, before,
I had touched them,
as if before they existed
they had passed over
my forehead, my waist?

Their softness came
flying over time,
over the sea, over the smoke,
over the spring,
and when you placed
your hands on my chest,
I recognized those golden
dove wings,
I recognized that clay
and that color of wheat.

All the years of my life
I walked around looking for them.
I went up the stairs,
I crossed the roads,
trains carried me,
waters brought me,
and in the skin of the grapes
I thought I touched you.
The wood suddenly
brought me your touch,
the almond announced to me
your secret softness,
until your hands
closed on my chest
and there like two wings
they ended their journey.

-- By Pablo Neruda

For my dear brother and his darling in honor of their new marriage.

Much love to you both!

Hill People: on Lanesboro and Love

2011-08-03T10:59:00.004-05:00

In the morning we drive. It's hot and sticky, something I mind only in a vague way--it's just the world working--but because it's my husband beside me, and as he's reminded me a thousand times, he can't take his skin off, we have the air conditioner on, the windows up, the changing landscapes passing us by in glimpses and sun-soaked blurry scenes. We're smiling, singing old high school songs.

Neither of us have spent time in southeast Minnesota before. It's always been southwest-leading roads, beckoning northeast shores, that deep central heart of the state dotted with lakes. But we keep hearing about the Root River Valley. For some reason, there's a pull, so we've fueled the car, packed crisp apples, and now follow lines on a map. First, we pass through farm country that looks no different than the central and western plots we've known our whole lives. There are new names, though: Hampton, Cannon Falls, Zumbrota, Pine Island. We ask each other: Could you live here? Could you live there? Because it's a day of wondering, of looking back and ahead, of understanding that there is so much we haven't yet seen.

At the little town of Chatfield, we turn left. Why not? There's a small back road. And both of us have whispered to each other this year about our preferences for these, for fewer lanes, for slower speeds, for a well-placed stop sign. We've decided not to rush today. And that's a good thing, for the road is so windy, full of so many hills suddenly, steep drops and thin rocky inclines, that going fast here is not an option for anyone above sixteen--and we've commented on that too recently, our getting older, the small lines appearing at our eyes, the feeling that life is full upon us now, our tendency to be more careful. As we turn right and travel a road with rollercoaster hills so regular and smooth we throw our hands up and out of momentarily lowered windows, I think, Maybe careful is all right, if it leads to this, if it means I care about this moment, and so many others like it, in a deeper way. Careful doesn't have to mean scared.

Then we enter Lanesboro, a village of 754 residents, full to bursting this Saturday afternoon with day-trippers, like us, unlike us, licking ice cream melting in cones, slinging babies on hips, renting inner-tubes and canoes and kayaks, talking to each other, touching each other, making the most of their summer. We park our car in some shade by the library. Before we cross the street, we hold hands.

In the afternoon, after we've spent the twenty minutes or so it takes to walk around most of the town, peek in some shops, and talk to a few locals, we rent two bikes. They are new and fancy and white. We both like them, and it's only minutes before we're on the Root River State Trail, feeling our bodies propelled down into the valley, down to the river, across wooden bridges, under branches with leaves the size of our faces and limestone ledges hundreds of feet above us on both sides, past purple and white and orange flowers with names I don't know. We stop on the long bridge where the south and north branches of the river meet, and watch sixteen-year-olds climb up on the high, hot metal of the bridge and leap into the churning wet. Could you do that, we ask each other, Would you do that? We guzzle our cold water and observe the people below us on inner tubes and in canoes, so like us, so unlike us, and continue on.

When we reach Whalan we stop at the pie shop for refills of water, and the girl behind the desk offers me her very own nectarine, after I inquire about fruit. There's a moment when I recognize myself in her, recognize my teenaged self: polite, a little shy, anxious to please. No, I say, thank you, though, and we return to our bikes and head back the way we came. I think about that girl. What is her life like, I ask my husband. What are her dreams? We wonder together where, ten years from now, she'll be. For most of the ride we are covered in shade, and the breeze on our necks is cool and refreshing, sweet, like fruit.

In the evening, after more strolling, menu-checking, after a fine meal on the river, and dessert, we begin our drive home. It's been a good day, but tiring. We have sweat on the back of our shirts. Still, at my urging, we take a different route out of Lanesboro. I want to find a lookout. We've been all day in a deep valley, places of beautiful corners and cathedrals of trees, but now I want to see. I want a hill to stand on where we can look back on everything that we've crossed over. We turn right onto a road that isn't on our map, that seems promising in the way of vistas--I'm following my instincts. But the road soon changes to a pale grey gravel edged by miles of thick corn we cannot see over. Corn. We bump along. I think several times about turning around. I consider my expectations: too big.

But, then we emerge. And we are high. Up on top of these southeastern bluffs, surrounded by rolling hills and at the foot of a wildflower meadow.

In my dream-life, my husband leads me out into this field and sings in my ear while we spin a while, slowly. He picks a few black-eyed Susans, holds out a bouquet. He's done both before. Maybe he takes his guitar from the trunk and we write a song right there. It is, after all, our five-year anniversary.

But it's hot, remember, and humid, and late, and he's not checked NPR all day, and there were those hills we biked up on our way back to Lanesboro, on our way here, to this place in our lives, all those hills. Could you live here? Can you see yourself there? Did you imagine this, those years ago, darling?

The truth is, my husband deeply appreciates air-conditioning, and he'd been out of it all day, for me. So this time I don't ask him to come with. I walk into that field alone. And I think, as I look out at the landscape, about how we are most often up but sometimes down, how we are cold and hot, and fast and slow, and rocky and smooth. How we are like and unlike everyone else on earth. We know we have the right fuel in the car, and so much of it, my God. We are careful like that. So let's take that turn, who knows where it leads. It could be up or down, right? We could be disappointed at the other end: more corn, more corn, more giant, sustaining corn. Or we could be mesmerized. Struck full with gratitude. A hilltop field so wide and beautiful it doesn't matter if one of us is in it and one of us is not, because when I look back I realize it encompasses us both.

Swimming

2011-08-01T10:43:00.000-05:00

From the archives, and for my darling

as we float past year number five. :)

We like to go for bike rides when the sun is sinking and everything swims in light. There are wheels under us, but aside from the ends of sidewalks--bump down, bump up--we could be floating along a quick river. Maybe we are.

"Name the colors that we pass: Go!"

Golden red, golden green, golden yellow, golden gold, a coppery blue.

In August, after a summer of good rain, everything seems to blend together in a gnarly mash of arms and leaves and branches and legs. It's all touching, straining after another finger, another wrist. We ride by and see ten-thousand embraces.

We are all a little bit desperate this time of year. We still have weeks of heat. But nothing is endless. Not even the sun.

When we glide home there are stars, and we whisper.

A Map of the World

2011-07-28T10:02:00.003-05:00

It's all there if we just slow down enough to look.

Minnesota's Hidden Alphabet

2011-07-26T09:47:00.001-05:00

I could say I had a hard time selecting my final Thirty Before Thirty "set in Minnesota" book. I could talk about John Hassler or Patricia Hampl or Carol Bly. I could write a very cerebral review, I suppose--you know, go out with some literary chops.

But I'm a sucker for kids books.

Minnesota's Hidden Alphabet came out in late 2010 to much fanfare, and it's been reviewed in multiple places, so the only thing I can really add to this conversation is another dose of love. Photographer Joe Rossi traveled the wild corners of the state in search of letters etched in the landscape, in the bodies of trout lilies, in the ears of cottontail rabbits. David LaRochelle's text matches up with the photos in clever ways ("Overhead or on the ground, Peeking, sneaking all around, Quietly these letters lie, Ready for your roving eye.") and adds in fun facts (There's a wildflower called butter-and-eggs. Who knew?). It's a book you could read in three minutes or three hours, a book you could read to thirty kids or the single dreamy one still inside you. It's an activity and a meditation. A brilliant idea. And my bet? A Minnesota classic. Thanks, David and Joe!

Heat

2011-07-20T18:19:00.000-05:00

ablaze, afire, ardent, bake, bask, blaze, blood-hot, boil, broil, calefaction, calidity, canicular, calorify, chafe, char, close, combustible, desire, diaphoretic, dog days, ebullient, enflame, enkindle, estiferous, excitement, ferocity, fervor, fever, fieriness, fire, flame, flush, frizzle, fry, fury, glow, grill, grow hot, heatwave, HOT, hot spell, hot weather, hot as pepper, ignite, incalescence, incandescence, incinerate, inflame, intensity, kindle, melt, molten, on fire, oppressive, oxidate, passion, perspire, piping hot, plutonic, rage, roast, scald, scorch, scumfished, sear, seethe, set on fire, singe, smoking, smoldering, sodden, steam, stifling, stuffy, suffocating, sultriness, sun, swelter, tepefy, toast, torrid, torridity, warmth, white-hot

What'd I miss?

Lake Rebecca Park Reserve

2011-07-19T10:06:00.002-05:00

The Big Woods. In the early 1800s, pre-settlement, huge stretches of Minnesota were covered in dense elm, basswood, sugar maple, and oak stands. When the French explorers came here, they noticed that these trees were taller and larger than those in many of the other forests they'd traveled through, so bois grand, they said. Big woods.

Big, beautiful woods, I said, as I walked along the extensive trails at Lake Rebecca Park Reserve, just outside of Delano. My mother and I had met there for a picnic: chicken salad and crackers, a green apple, fresh-picked strawberries, and cold water. As we explored the quiet beach, the busy playground, and the shady walkways, I thought about those early-1800s years and how Minnesota looked then. One of my childhood dreams was to be an explorer, to walk over land few had seen. Although the many acres that make up Lake Rebecca Park were discovered long ago, ambling through it gave me a bit of that experience, because--what is up ahead of that bend, you know?

Today, just two percent of the original Big Woods remain in Minnesota, due to initial tree cutting for timber, firewood, and farmland. The Three Rivers Park District--one of my favorite organizations out here west of the Minneapolis metro--is doing their best to restore parts of the land to its original state, plump full of creatures like the pileated woodpecker, the little brown bat, the barred owl, the blue-spotted salamander, the chipmunk, and trees like the burr oak and green ash.

I wish them all the luck in our big world. Parks like these are literal gifts to their community. How lucky we are to have places to go that are tucked away, that are wild, that are full of the best and most rejuvenating kinds of sounds and smells and sights. Every time I discover a new one around Minnesota, I can't imagine living anywhere else.

Lake Shetek at Sunrise

2011-07-15T10:29:00.001-05:00

Loon Island

2011-07-13T10:10:00.053-05:00

What do you say to an island?

Hello.

Hello, there.

I came to say...

Yes?

Just hello, I guess.

Hello.

And what is it like and how does it feel and what are the sounds and smells and tastes of being here so always, so all-year-everyday, so long?

It is like...

Yes?

This.

When I canoe across the wide water, when I slide into the bay, along its shore, I pay attention. I notice muskrats and blackbirds, fish flopping, and wind. I think about its name--Loon--and its location--south--and I wonder at the way it was when those northern birds were here enough to leave their name. How much changes on an island like this? No houses, no campers, no impervious surfaces. Just green and brown and blue and green and green and green and green. What is it like to be so set apart? To have children watch you every summer of their lives, curious and wise? And then for them to go away, sometimes for long stretches of time, only to come back older and quieter and less brave? Does the island pay attention, I wonder? Does it know my name?

Hello.

Hello, there.

I came to say...

Yes?

Hello.

And that I'm glad you're here, there, where you are in the middle of all this water and in the winter ice because you are so much of my memories, a relative's face, and I look for you in my mind when I am feeling lonely and you are always where I knew you'd be.

I am here.

Yes.

Right here.
An island.
Surrounded by you and us and me.

Strawberry Picking

2011-07-11T09:54:00.000-05:00

And yes, they taste as good as they look. Yaaaow!

Highs and Lows: The Writing Life

2011-07-08T09:51:00.004-05:00

My girlfriends and I have a Christmas tradition: exchange ornaments, and after, verbally unpack our individual years, one by one, no time restrictions. The only rule we adhere to is that for every low, there must be two highs.

It is July now, months away from ornaments and tinsel, but one full year since I finished my MFA degree, and I feel the same tendencies today to look back and evaluate as I usually do at the close of a calendar. So, will you be my listeners here? My non-sweater-clad friends? All I ask is that you mumble a few hmmms, perhaps nod once in a while. After all, we’ve each experienced the ups and down of something, right?

Here are my writing-related lows of the past twelve months:

1. Glimmer Train did not publish "Preservation."

2. Ploughshares did not publish "Preservation."

3. One Story did not publish "Preservation."

4. "Preservation" was—I felt—my best short story, yet none of my goal journals published it, and I was left wondering (dejectedly) why.

5. I reread it. Wrote a new opening. Deleted the new opening. Skimmed a series of old emails about fondue.

6. Hope became a slippery thing.

7. Sometimes, usually in the morning, I clutched at small spoonfuls of hope—"You will get this grant, your work is a perfect fit, it will all pan out, be patient"—but then I’d receive an email stating "Sorry," and I wouldn’t read the attached feedback, I just couldn't yet, I felt too tired.

8. So I missed the deadline for the next grant.

9. And got many more rejections.

10. And stopped really writing.

11. I began to think that—since I was a white, middle-class, working woman who’d lived a pretty good life, not much struggle, not much unordinary pain, not much grit under my fingernails that I hadn't put there on purpose because I felt I was perhaps too clean—I had nothing important to say.

12. I began to believe this.

The highs:

1. One Tuesday, on my drive to work, I watched an astonishing sunrise fill up my rearview mirror.

2. I read a friend's brilliant essay and felt inspired.

3. I started a blog.

4. A small literary journal published one of my poems, a poem I’d written years ago, that I'd always loved, that I couldn't understand why others didn't love just as much. The publication contract came with this note: "I absolutely loved this one."

5. I read the poem to my husband and we went out for Thai food.

6. A month later, and then later still, we ordered more bowls of Toam Yum.

7. A letter said that out of 250 applications, I was in the top 80 for a grant I'd practically forced myself to forget I'd applied for. Top 80, big whoop, I told myself. But it was a spoonful. And I held its sweetness on my tongue.

8. I read b o o k s.

9. I recited e.e. cummings to my students.

10. I told Haley that her story was beautiful, mature, and full of nuanced surprises, and her whole face, her whole body lit up, and my throat tightened.

11. I took them all on a nature walk behind the school.

12. They wrote about it in their journals.

13. I wrote about it in mine.

14. I went to the Arboretum with my camera and found new angles, new ways to look at leaves, new levels of light and shadow.

15. I went home and wrote.

16. I published unproven and sentimental words in my own time, on my own created space, and though every time I was frightened, it got easier.

17. Someone left the comment, "I love this one."

18. Someone else wrote from Greece, sharing that an essay of mine was in a publication that was currently on his coffee table.

19. I paused, thought, refocused, and reminded myself that, yes, these small successes were nice, better, easier to bring to the lips, but what was most important—above any other outcome—was that my words mattered to me.

20. I wrote more place essays. I wrote about Minnesota. I wrote about the lake where I spent my childhood summers.

21. There was a wait, and it was excruciating—full of doubts and purposeful-forgetting—but a nice man named Gus told me yes. One year from now, next summer, "The Lake" will appear in the DNR's Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, one of my goal magazines.

22. Over the Fourth of July, I shared the draft with my family around the campfire.

23. I did not get that grant, but I applied for the next one.

24. I did not place "Preservation." Yet.

25. "Someday,” I promised myself, “You will write a damn good book."

On July 8, 2011, I believe it.

This essay was also published here at A View From The Loft.

Ways to Say Summer

2011-07-04T13:15:00.000-05:00

in Danish: sommer

in Swedish: sommar

in Old English: sumor

in Dutch: zomer

in Czech: éto

in Greek: καλοκαίρι

in Quechua: chakisqa pacha

in Arabic: صيف

in Lakota: blokétu

in Chechen: akhke

in Chinese: 夏天

in French: été

in Japanese: 夏

in Latin: aestas

in Fijian: vulaikatakata

in Russian: лето

in Somali: xagaa

in Spanish: verano

in Thai: หน้าร้อน

Or, in Me:

charcoal grills

bratwursts

green water hoses

peppers

small stones in clear streams

festivals

farmers markets

canoes

pontoons

bonfires

back porches

berries

flower gardens

clear skies

fireflies

baseball hats

late nights

white wine

love in the afternoon

Lake Sagatagan

2011-06-30T09:35:00.001-05:00

I have several "favorite places on earth" that range in location from gardens in Germany to cliffs in Hawaii to some crazy peacock ranch in Lubock, Texas, but one that is closer to home is Lake Sagatagan. Apart from its beauty, it's one of the only lakes I know (outside of The Boundary Waters) that has both a no development and no motor policy. There are a few St. John's University buildings, including the chapel, but other than that, the lake is surrounded by light and dark greens: maple, oak, birch, elm, pine, lily pad, bulrush, water iris. The water is a perfect cold, a perfect clear. And canoes are king.

Two weekends ago, I went canoe fishing on Sagatagan with my Dad-o. It was an overcast day, but that made the sunnies easier to see, and I've always loved being choosey with the fate of my worms. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven -- up they came, energetic and yellow-bellied and big enough to eat, and I wondered aloud why I'd let a year pass since I'd last made time for the canoe, for fishing rods and nightcrawlers and an afternoon at the lake I've come to for most of my life.

The best part of the afternoon was when Pop hooked a bigger fish with his rapala. It took ten minutes of struggle, of detangling the line from the weeds, of waiting the bugger out, before a monster big-mouthed bass emerged, and I am not ashamed to say I screamed! for the sheer joy of it! the shock! because I've never been witness to such a big fish being pulled from such shallow water. My lack of restraint made my dad grin, which made me grin all the more, because--hey--life is sometimes so right you've just got to shout.

Where are your favorite places on earth, friends?

I have a few extra shouts in my belly, just waiting... :)

Decorative Fans

2011-06-28T10:08:00.000-05:00

The Heartland

2011-06-24T08:12:00.001-05:00

The other weekend I took a road trip to visit my grandma. To start, I drove straight west on Highway 7 for two hours, then southwest for another two. I hadn't made this particular trip by myself maybe ever, and for a while I lost myself in my college CDs, the open windows, the sunshine highlighting the tops of hills and the bellies of little crooked streams. We'd had days and days of rain, so the land was lush.

It didn't take long, though, maybe an hour west of Minneapolis, before I was struck by the ubiquitous presence of farms. Grain, dairy, turkey--they spread out on each side of the highway, patchwork squares extending into the horizon. Flyover Country.

I did not grow up on a farm. My grandmother did, in Iowa. Two of my cousins did, in Pipestone. A few of my high school friends did: Elisha, Robyn, Mary Jo.

But, no. What many easterners and westerners might think about the heartland--everyone tied somehow to a barn and a silo--isn't true, at least not true for most of us, not anymore. My family bought milk from the store. We didn't have a cellar. There were no fences to mend or cows that got out or dinner bells to ring. Waking up for chores at five a.m. was something I only heard about, like a war story, and on those below-zero winter mornings, I thanked the Lord that I was a businessman's daughter.

Still, I am a child of this region, and though the intricacies of farms and farmers are unfamiliar to me, I've watched the fields every season of my life, always aware of the height of the corn.

So that morning it felt like a betrayal, a jibe against something I should have admired, when I found myself admitting that the acres of farms I was passing were not beautiful. What was aesthetic about a flat square of soil? About box-shaped homes? About yards filled with implements and old tractors and ramshackle sheds? There was not landscaping; there was function. An elbow of sturdy oak woods left to stand as a windbreak on the northwest side of the house. Lilac bushes, tall and wrangly, along the highway for some semblance of privacy. Worn tractor tires turned over next to doorsteps and filled with dirt, sprigs of basil and chives growing inside. A mousing cat waiting at the end of a gravel driveway with no ears.

Surely it's because of such images that some leave for mountains, for vast oceans, for cosmopolitan high-rises that do not, for all their height, overlook one plot of uncultivated land. I can understand that. We live in a time where we have every right and ability to choose the view from our windows. To follow our hearts.

I, for one, have always chased beauty. My desire to travel, to experience every faraway corner of the world is so strong, that it often drives my husband crazy and leaves me anxious for all I have not seen, for all I might never see, as time does not stop, as I keep getting older, as the rains keep falling and the sea levels keep rising and the islands keep sinking into places beyond my reach. There are moments when I am hyper-aware of all that I’m missing.

But then in the midst of those thoughts, in the midst of a morning drive west through farmland, I crested the smallest possible hill on the quietest stretch of highway in the most unassuming part of the Midwest, and a black calf was in the middle of the road one hundred yards ahead, just standing there under the wide sky, skinny-legged and unsure, glancing toward the fence he’d squeezed through.

I stopped the car. I got out. I walked a few steps toward him, a corn field on my left, a corn field on my right. Clouds were rolling in, tinting the land. I kneeled on the pavement. The grasses swished in the ditches. Birds called from fence posts. And we looked at each other, he and I, for a long time.

This essay was also published on Minnpost.com.

St. Croix River at Sunset

2011-06-22T10:22:00.003-05:00

"Happy is England"

2011-06-20T07:22:00.000-05:00

Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own;
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through its tall woods with high romances blent:
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment
For skies Italian, and an inward groan
To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,
And half forget what world or worldling meant.
Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters;
Enough their simple loveliness for me,
Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging:
Yet do I often warmly burn to see
Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,
And float with them about the summer waters.

-- by John Keats

A Minnesota Year (twelvemonthsblogging!)

2011-06-17T08:47:00.002-05:00

I really thought I began this blog last July. Where does the time go? In any case, I'm amazed and thrilled that I've kept up this space for this many months, that I've written what I have, that I've inspired myself, inspired others (hope so! the blog has reached 8900 pageviews somehow), and that I've connected with individuals and the world in ways that I otherwise would not have. That's pretty cool. Pretty worth it.

To commemorate this little milestone, I've put together a collection of images from the past year that have shown up here (or will soon) and have set them to music (my husband's!). This is my first attempt at anything video-ish, so it's a bit rough, but I had fun making it, and I hope--especially if you're one of my fabulous extraordinary rockstar subscribers--it will remind you of all the reasons I've found to love my homeplace, my landscape, this strangely shaped state: Minnesota.

For your viewing pleasure, may I present A Minnesota Year:

A MINNESOTA YEAR from Emily Brisse on Vimeo.

Laura Ingalls Dugout Site

2011-06-15T10:04:00.005-05:00

Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, On the Banks
of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake.

Is it any wonder that with childhood books like these I've developed a proclivity for place-centered literature?

Over Memorial Day weekend, my mother accompanied me to Walnut Grove in southwestern Minnesota for a very specific purpose: to visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum. I would have gone with no one but her. She read all the Little House books to me when I was a child, and some of my most vivid memories from my single-digit years are a concoction of her voice, the inevitable (if imagined) winds off the prairie, the quilt my mother and I were often cozied under, and Laura's flapping bonnet. To say I loved these books is an understatement. They were one of my earliest experiences of living vicariously through the lives of others, of traveling through words.

The museum itself is not much--lots of books and souvenirs and several replicated late-1800s buildings. But we had come to Walnut Grove mostly to drive a mile and a half north of it, to visit the original Ingalls Dugout Site where the Ingalls family had passed several months in a sod home literally dug out of the river bank. I was hoping, as we drove down the winding gravel road, for something less commercial, more natural, more like the descriptions Laura gave of her surroundings that, as a young Minnesota girl, I could both imagine and recognize.

Something like this:

"Laura...saw a grassy bank, and beyond it a line of willowtree tops, waving in the gentle wind. Everywhere else the prairie grasses were rippling far away to the sky's straight edge. ... There was only the high sky above her, and down below her the water was talking to itself."

From the golden Alexander, to the dandelions, to the creek lined with plum trees that was audibly rushing--climbing up the banks, submerging logs and trees, creating those swimming holes Laura described--I was content. This was the world I remember. This was the hill she played on. This was and still is a hard, unforgiving, but beautiful landscape, one I'm thankful to have known in both literature and life.

Someday I will read these books to my children. Then I will bring them here. I will let them run down the hill strewn with wildflowers, their arms flailing, their laughter echoing, their bodies so comfortable and free.

I will say to them, a little girl lived here long ago. Many things have changed since then, but others--perhaps the most important things--have not. Slow down now, just for a while. Be still. Watch "the prairie grasses swaying and bending, and yellow flowers nodding." Did you see how the "birds rose and flew and sank into the grasses. [How] the sky curved very high and its rim came neatly down to the faraway edge of the round earth"?

Plant Literate #5: Wild Columbine

2011-06-13T08:27:00.007-05:00

For the uninitiated, prairies call to mind only a few colors: green, yellow, brown--or some mix of the three. In actuality, though, the myriad wildflowers found amid the grasses and on their edges are multi-hued and brilliant, deserving of all the second-looks they inspire.

Say hello to the wild columbine.

My mother and I guessed honeysuckle first, as its little bell-flowers hang similiarly and smell just as sweet. But later we were corrected, and happily so. I would have hated to miss out on details like this: boiled, it can be used for hair wash; and crushed, its seeds can be rubbed on palms as love potion. Why not? You'd certainly smell delightful.

The wild columbine is my fifth Thirty Before Thirty plant, and I must say I've adored this part of my list. I've paid so much more attention this spring, reallyreally slowed down and looked and examined and sniffed and listened. List or not, blog or not, I think I've found a hobby I will enjoy for the rest of my life.

Pipestone National Monument

2011-06-10T08:48:00.001-05:00

"When you pray with this pipe, you pray for and with everything." -- Black Elk

I can promise you one thing: when my brother and I, as children, careened around the Pipestone National Monument's Circle Trail (through prairie, over rocks, up cliffs, down ledges, through prairie), we were not thinking about prayer. We did not slow down enough to imagine that anything might be particularly sacred about the place. It just was cool to climb stuff. Our parents were from Pipestone, the small southwestern Minnesota town where the park resides, and the park seemed as much our backyard playground as it had once been theirs.

I was older--twelve, maybe--when I was given my first pair of dangling, red pipestone earrings, carved into the shape of leaves, and older still--fifteen?--when I was given my first small ceremonial pipe. There were conversations surrounding these gifts, explanations of how the pipestone was quarried from the earth, how it had been a part of Native American religious traditions for centuries, how these were not earrings to be handled carelessly or a pipe to be used in jest.

"No matter what the tribes were warring over," my mother said, "they could come here and quarry and be promised peace. Many people believe that the smoke from these pipes carries prayers to the Great Spirit, to God."

I recently revisited the 260 acres of active quarries and native tallgrass prairie. It was a beautiful day--bright blue skies, large shifting clouds, a landscape alive with the movement of spring into summer. I walked past the ledges where my brother and I used to run. I stepped over small streams that we used to leap. I screamed over the wiggly tent catepillars oh-so-temporarily trapped in their nests exactly as I would have done twenty years ago.

The stream, so often a measly trickle in my memories, was pulsing with the presence of our recent long winter, and I walked carefully over pipestone-made bridges, tread slowly along the muddy banks, and had to turn around when one part of the path had been overrun by surging water.

Winnewissa Falls was as wild as I have ever seen it. I got up close enough so its cool spray coated my face, so there was nothing possibly to hear but the pounding the pounding the pounding the pounding.

There was a kind of peace in that: letting everything else be drowned out.

When I passed the Face in the Rock--a Dakota or Sioux brave watching Winnewissa--I remembered another story, about how young Native American men would leap from one stone ledge to another. They did this to prove themselves, or because they were told to in a dream, or just for fun--I can't quite remember--but what is important is that something inside of them trusted that the air would carry their bodies, that when they set down their feet, they would meet with something solid, something as red and a part of them as any beating heart.

There is much about the monument I don't know or understand. It could never be any other way: this land is not mine. But its wind still moves the earrings dangling from my ears in the same way it moves the grasses. Its trails and quarries and cliffs still speak to the six year old, the twelve year old, the twenty-nine year old inside of me. It still opens my spirit and floods in.

Exaltation

2011-06-08T07:48:00.000-05:00

"For a year or two I had been looking at trees, fields, landscape with a secret, strong exaltation. In some moods, some days, I could feel for a clump of grass, a rail fence, a stone pile, such pure unbounded emotion as I used to hope for, and have inklings of, in connection with God."

-- From Lives of Girls and Women

by Alice Munro

Next to a Lake

2011-06-05T12:07:00.004-05:00

One way to spend a Sunday afternoon:

Call two of your best friends.

Travel thirty minutes east.

After driving up and down the backstreets of Uptown for what feels like ever,

find a parking spot, gather your towel and swimming suit and water bottle, and meet them a ways down from the masses at the 32nd Street Beach on a piece of quieter lawn along Lake Calhoun.

Feel the sun on your bare skin. Feel summer.

Go into the still-winter water and throw sticks to the big dog,

laugh as the little dog yips and shivers.

Notice how everyone--the dogs, the swimmers, the rollerbladers, the bikers, the strollers, the posers, the regulars, the crazies, the scantily-clad--are all smiling.

Later, amble--yes, amble--to The Tin Fish.

Stand in a thirty-minute line for fish tacos and ice cream.

People watch (There are thousands and thousands around the lake today).

Sing something.

On Top of a Haybale

2011-06-04T07:25:00.001-05:00

One way to spend a Saturday morning:

Drive west until the rolling hills of Wright and Carver County flatten out,

until every other turn left or right off the highway would be onto gravel,

until the thought why not fills you up, flows into your fingers, convinces you to take the next turn.

Stop the car. Step out. Feel the wet mud coating your shoes, the dew still heavy on the long grasses.

Go meet those hulks of friends that smile back sleepily,

that are grateful to have survived the winter, too.

Discover that they are wrapped in thin wire.

That they are much taller than you'd imagined, from behind your window inside your car on the highway.

Place your hands on them.

You are trespassing.

But they are complicit, and say nothing to discourage you.

Sing something.

Bird Ballad #2: Barn Swallow

2011-06-02T08:35:00.004-05:00

Nothing fancy here. I'm teaching myself the basics, by which I mean the basics of my day, by which I mean the darn barn swallows that wake me up each morning with their incessant twitterings. I will say this, though: since I've poked through a bird-watching book, identified the creature within the "bluebird" category, and matched its song to the sounds linked below, I seem to have forgiven the little things. Perhaps knowledge makes the heart grow fonder?

My goodness, whatever are they talking about?

So You'd Know I Was Here

2011-05-31T08:54:00.002-05:00

"i thank you God for most this amazing"

2011-05-27T10:08:00.000-05:00

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings; and of the gay
great happening ilimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-- by e. e. cummings

For My Father

2011-05-22T10:14:00.008-05:00

You were never much of a hunter. Pheasants, yes. Squirrels and chipmunks, I suppose, when you were younger. But you never came home from a weekend away with a buck in the bed of your truck, because you never had much interest in deer opener and you owned a sedan. I imagine some people from other places can hardly conceive of a Midwestern man without a shotgun over his mantle, a closet full of blaze-orange jackets, a copy of Field and Stream next to the john. And yet when I think of you, I do see an outdoorsman. I see you paying attention to landscapes, to the clouds. I see you teaching me to love the world.

Remember the leaf piles in Autumn? The way you would dive into them just like me? Remember the way you tied one end of a strong rope to the front of my winter sled and the other around your waist, and proceeded to tote me behind you as you cross-country skied? Remember the snow castles? The trips to the lake? The canoe fishing? The toads and turkeys and garter snakes and robins and muskrats and owls and caterpillars you'd point out, whispering?

My favorite times were when you'd drive all of us out of town on an early spring or late fall day. You'd stop along some gravel road, within some stretch of wooded hills. You'd sling a backpack over your shoulder full of canteens and saltine crackers and licorice. We'd go hiking. Often we'd follow the trails deep into the woods, so deep that the only sounds were nature sounds, the only smells were of wet or dry earth. When we veered off them, it was because you urged us to, or you'd taught us to, because you wanted to see the valley from a higher place, and soon enough we wanted to know what was down by that stream.

When you leaped up onto old fallen logs, walked across them like an acrobat, arms gracefully extended, we felt ourselves the luckiest children to have you.

And once--deer opener a week away, the air crisp--you stopped mid-step ahead of me and slowly dropped to your knees. "Em," you whispered, "look." I hunched down beside you as quietly as I could and followed your finger with my eyes. There, at the top of the ridge-line, were three white-tailed deer, one a seven-point buck. I felt a certain bigness in that moment, and I felt your hand on my back.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Plant Literate #4: Tarda Tulip

2011-05-20T09:16:00.026-05:00

I love the way Gustavus Adolphus College lives on top of a hill. I love its river valley, its view of the fog that lifts off the moving water in the morning, its wide skies. I love the highest pane of the highest window on the highest floor of Old Main, especially at dusk. I love its crab apple trees. I love its open lawns. I love its sidewalks. And even more than these, I love the friendships I formed as I strolled those sidewalks, reclined on those lawns, studied under those trees, stared out from that window, and hiked up and down that hill toward or away from that valley the four years I was a student there. Gustavus gave me an education, yes. But it also gave me friends who are as bright and assured and open as flowers. We see each other less now than we did then, but when we reunite, it is always always spring.

Some of them joined me for a picnic last night among the thousands of tulips that are up at the Arb. Don't get me wrong: I can point out a tulip. Almost every Minnesotan can. But it is an easy recognition, like looking at a passing woman's smile and deciding she is kind. You do not know her name unless you ask. You do not remember her name unless she is somehow different from all the other names, all the other kind faces. So when you do ask and remember and meet up again and become friends and support each other and know without much conversation that you will always be a part of each other's lives, you have found something that is no longer a tulip, five letters, pink or purple or orange or red. You have found a tarda tulip. A tulip that grows star-shaped. A tulip that is an open-palmed hand. You walk up to them, these flowers, your own arms extended, and you know you have found blooms that will glow in each season of your life.

Sniff This

2011-05-18T16:20:00.001-05:00

(

The blossoms, that is.

Not my husband. :) It is HEAVEN here, folks. Hope you're getting outside.

My (Almost-Tragic) Hail Story

2011-05-15T20:21:00.005-05:00

This is a scene from last Monday.

Hubs and I are giddy. It is 88', and humid, the kind of humid you complain about in June, July, and August, but in May, it is all good, baby, in fact it is down right sublime. "Give me more of this stuff!" I yell out at the edge of the deck--I am perched there, reveling in the sensation of sweat--and the words fly back at me atop hot, fat wind. See, along with the humidity, the 7:00 night is cooking up a whole mix of tight, angry air. Dark clouds are rising higher and higher along the south skyline. It's storm weather.

Yet this doesn't bother us. Anything severe usually comes our way from the northwest, and we simply cannot stay in on such a summer-like night. So we pull on shorts and t-shirts, strap into sandals, and hop on our bikes.

For the record, I do look back and up over my shoulder more than once. I notice it: the clouds aren't just dark. They're a kind of a pink-orange black. One of us says, "Are you sure this is safe?" but the fact that we aren't doesn't deter us. IT IS HOT. Have I mentioned that? We are, for all practical purposes, on a different planet.

That's when we see heat lightning. We're biking into sea-blue skies. We're cruising away from the storm into a perfect evening, and yet shocks of electricity start dropping miles from any storm cloud. I'm in awe, not scared, completely present. Like some crazywoman. And right as I start to sense the true wildness in the air, G calls out, "Em! Did you see that?"

I hadn't, but no sooner do I say so, than a penny-sized piece of hail pings in front of me off the cement.

We don't know how we have so miscalculated the direction of the storm, but as another piece drops, and then another, we understand that to turn back now means certain pongs and pangs all along our precious heads, so simultaneously we both yell, "Go! Bike for your life!" and we hot-pedal it to the old train bridge we both know is up ahead.

We are underneath the bridge for no more than one minute before the hail turns from penny-sized to golfball, then from golfball to clementine. At first we stand several feet from the edge, listening to the whaps and bams of the ice snapping small branches and hitting the bridge's top. But then we move back, toward the middle, because though the concrete structure we are standing in is long, a tunnel, the wind now is fierce and cold, and it starts to propel the hail and rain all the way through. My darling, sweet, manly husband wraps me in his arms and blocks my body as best he can, but we are quickly dripping, quickly shivering, and just as we'd been this whole time, still giggling from our bellies, reckless and ridiculous, yes, but laughing laughing like we are twelve years old.

The hail only lasts for five minutes. When it stops, chunks of busted ice cover the trail, and larger, unbroken pieces dot the grasses like transparent Easter eggs. The rain quickly transitions from blinding to steady to mist, and by the time I gather a few purple spring beauties along the tunnel's edge that have survived the pummeling (like us), the storm has completely passed.

We laugh. We kiss. G picks up a few ice eggs and flings them at the tunnel wall, easily entertained by their fantastic splatterings.

And then we bike home. Hail is everywhere, huge pieces that are still melting on roadsides fifteen minutes later. And those clouds? From the back-end (an accurate description this time), they are gargantuan, something out of a myth, a roiling gray monster octopus that keeps showing me his behind-the-head eye.

I realize we are no longer laughing. Our throats are already stretched from looking up, our mouths just open.

A revised version of this essay will be published in the
July 2012 issue of Birmingham Arts Journal under the title "Octopus Eye."

Oh, Hello

2011-05-12T09:47:00.007-05:00

Bird Ballad #1: Red-Winged Blackbird

2011-05-10T10:06:00.007-05:00

And, yes, if you were wondering, my last post did allude to a certain avian creature and a certain call, namely the red-winged blackbird, specifically this conk-la-reeee sound:

	Lang Elliott - Red-winged Blackbird .mp3

	Found at bee mp3 search engine

All of which, of course, connects to a certain list.

You should have seen me there on that grassy knoll, trying to block out every other sound, listening listening listening to these few notes like they were a secret code to some all-important riddle I would later need to answer. Who knows! Maybe they are.

Lowry Nature Center

2011-05-09T08:28:00.016-05:00

Nothing gets me like a nice day's walk through wooded hills, so when I took my first true-spring tour around the Lowry Nature Center acreage last Friday, I was beside myself with delight. Have you been here? If you're a southwestern Minneapolis metro dweller and you just shook your head no, you have a drive to make, friend, and a set of trails to explore. I mean it.

As a part of the Carver Park Reserve and Three Rivers Park District, the Lowry Nature Center's 250 acres include eight miles of trails, habitats that vary from hardwood forests to tamarack bogs, and a diverse array of wildlife. During my afternoon walk, I was most impressed by the birds. At one point--after I sat down beside a sunny pond and was quiet--I had a white crane fishing for dinner on my left, two Canadian geese touching beaks on my right, five wood ducks flitting nervously atop the water, any number of marsh wrens and black-capped chickadees leaping from one limb to the next behind me, and a red-winged blackbird singing out conk-la-reeee! in the oak branches right above my head. The constant chirping and trilling and tweeting was extraordinary, was an undeniable reminder that spring has arrived with a voice all its own.

The spring ephemerals are up, too: spring beauties on the Oak Trail, hepatica on the Aspen Trail, and on the Tamarack, whole stretches of forest floor green with the beginnings of cutleaf toothwort. Don't worry; that last one sounds pretty awful to me, too, but I promise it's not. Its little teeth-petals are a perfect bright-white, and the only infection it will give is a healthy one: appreciation, a wild contagion that will spread straight through you.

Plant Literate #3: Forsythia

2011-05-05T10:47:00.000-05:00

Here is one of my sixty before sixty goals: to have someone name a flowering plant Foremily.

When I was two I would have been drawn to forsythia. Always, always, always I have loved effusions of blossoms. They transport me somewhere magical, and it's an especially potent trip here in Minnesota because these colorful displays come off of months of white. But I've never known it's name. Never known anything about it except for it's beauty. Now I know these things: this variety is called the Northern Sun, it was introduced by the U of M specifically for colder climate cultivation in 1982, and it's thriving here now, in spite of those 30' nights. Also, I know that someday I will plant one or ten of these in my yard, and herald its spring blooms with my whole heart.

Amateur Naturalist

2011-05-03T07:42:00.001-05:00

Sometimes I feel like an idiot. How has it taken me twenty-nine years to learn that the sometimes tall/ sometimes short/ sometimes bushy plant that is always green but is not an evergreen tree that lined our yard when I was nine is called arborvitae? How do I not know the differences between petunias and pansies? Why can't I classify that bird call if I have heard it all my life? Shame, ladies and gentlemen, swells up.

But then--thankfully, because where would I be if the other side of my inner-voice wasn't encouraging and gentle?--I start to write down the names of plants and animals I can name, that I hold in the store of my memories: garter snake, blackbird, robin, mourning dove, bullfrog, salamander, eastern cottontail, white-tailed deer, muskrat, porcupine, cardinal, bluejay, crow, black-capped chickadee, blue heron, lilac, snowdrop, striped and siberian squill, maple, oak, birch, pine, weeping willow, crab apple, chipmunk, grey squirrel, striped skunk, goldenrod, black-eyed susan, tulip, rose, geranium, hydrangea, bleeding heart, mum, fern, philodendron, water lily, clover, carrot, rhubarb, strawberry, raspberry, cattails, milkweed, painted turtle, mallard, trumpeter swan, Canadian goose, red fox, coyote, timberwolf, lynx, wild turkey, dandelion, sumac, poison ivy, poison oak, cricket, grasshopper, woodtick, mosquito, black fly, boxelder bug, bald eagle, loon, trout, trout lily, sunfish, catfish, carp, crappie, bullhead, bass, walleye, daddylong legs, monarch butterfly, dragonfly, raccoon, pheasant, hawk, bison, black bear, agate, granite.

And then I think, too: if I lived in Texas or Florida or New Mexico, I might be impressed with this list. Or maybe not. I might think, Why, that girl is a bit of a naturalist. Or maybe not. Some people learn the Latin names for things like others learn Spanish.

But I think for today--since I am trying--I'll rest on this thought, a type of bullfrog chorus: Good for her.

Good for me.

And onward.

How about you, wonderful-dear-and-genius readers?

What parts of the natural world do you know by name?

"Early Spring"

2011-04-29T09:12:00.000-05:00

Harshness vanished. A sudden softness
has replaced the meadows' wintry grey.
Little rivulets of water changed
their singing accents. Tendernesses,

hesitantly, reach toward the earth
from space, and country lanes are showing
these unexpected subtle risings
that find expression in the empty trees.

-- by Rainer Maria Rilke

Plant Literate #2: Squill

2011-04-26T09:16:00.001-05:00

Here's the truth: I hardly know what to write here, or for that matter really want to write anything, because I am simply so satisfied with the walk I just had. Wildflowers! Nothing against the Snowdrops. They were all about hope, which I desperately needed the day I found them in the Arb, but today there was color everywhere. Yes, still a lot of brown. But also SO MUCH GREEN. So many little plants pushing up up up up up up up. And when I came across these purplely-blue bells and white-blue stars carpeting whole stretches of earth, I literally gasped. That is how much of a nut I am.

The Siberian Squill and Striped Squill made my day. They are number two on my Thirty Before Thirty list, and I love them. They remind me of eyelashes. That is all.

Easter Eggs

2011-04-24T09:48:00.004-05:00

My Places

2011-04-18T10:02:00.010-05:00

We have lived in this town for almost four years, and the map I have that marks out the local trails and parks is covered in yellow pen. This is my doing. I have lived in several different places, and in each one, I've felt the drive to discover, to walk across, to recognize. But there has always been one place in each of them--one special location--that I thought of separately as my own.

In L, it was the slab of cement in the corner of the backyard. I loved it, yes, because it held a little table and chairs and the entire house of my imagination. But it was also shaded by protective old oak trees, hedged in on one side by lilac bushes, and on the other--a wide field of grasses, the first stretch of land that I could not see the end of. As a child, I didn't know what I loved more: covered or wide open. I still don't. Perhaps it was here I learned the exquisite difficulty of making up my mind.

In S J, The Fort--built amid the boughs of pine trees, against the texture of their papery bark--was the place my gaze went when I looked out my bedroom window and was the place my feet took me when I wanted solace or daydreams with knowable dimensions. There are so many stories here. They swell out of me as cyclically as sap.

In C S, it was the nearby stream. When I was not alongside it with my brother, leading pollution-clean-up expeditions, befriending the ducks, building gullies with large stones to give the fish a place to rest, I was there on my own, with a book, searching for the most romantic patch of grass, the best scene both in fiction and real life.

In S P, I found four different maple trees outside of four different apartments, each of them with a sweeping view of the Minnesota River Valley. My college has many virtues, but the truth is that I chose it because of the landscapes it encompassed, because I could see myself sitting on the benches, aware, open in all that vast space, watching for the buds to pop one spring morning into leaves.

In W, my place was in a cemetery. It existed on the highest hill within walking distance, and it gave me glorious sunsets. It gave me much to contemplate. It gave me, when life was changing around me at such a startling pace, peace.

In B, I went on runs through the residential neighborhoods, passing red wagons and bikes with training wheels, little kids squealing under sprinklers, and paused--my midpoint--at the closest lake. There was a fishing pier and a boat launch and a beach full of swimmers. But I clung to the edge of the park, next to the trees, where I would stretch my arms up, bring my hands together, lower them in front of my chest, breathe out. I knew no one in that town besides my newlywed love, but I knew the sidewalks, I knew the water and the air.

And at the end of all this, which I'm sure will one day be the middle, or even the beginning, it's strange to realize that I have no one place here. Instead I have five of them, or seven, or three. I have the miles and miles of trails we have crossed. I have the parks I think of as affectionately as sisters. I have the bends I love to stop at along the lakes, the groves where I have met animals, the crab apple blossoms that I wait for each spring. Daily I stare out our windows at the shifting field, and at the old woods beyond it.

I don't know how long we will stay. I'm not sure what it means that I don't have one place I always go to here besides home. But I do feel myself pulling long threads through the land around me, watching the same hawk dance and dive, learning the names of streams and streets, stitching us in with each bike ride, each yellow glide of my pen.

"Spring Thunder"

2011-04-14T15:09:00.001-05:00

Listen, The wind is still,
And far away in the night --
See! The uplands fill
With a running light.

Open the doors. It is warm;
And where the sky was clear--
Look! The head of a storm
That marches here!

Come under the trembling hedge--
Fast, although you fumble...
There! Did you hear the edge
of winter crumble

-- by Mark Van Doren

Teachers

2011-04-12T08:02:00.001-05:00

Today I am thankful for the warm temperatures. For the red cardinal I saw hiding in a fir tree. For the bluebird that followed it. For the muskrat swimming the shallows of a now-open pond. For the four deer that watched me watch them. For cumulus clouds in a bright blue sky, so like summer.

And my students. I am thankful for them, too. Because regardless of what people say about education, regardless of how much funding our district does or does not receive, regardless of what does or does not get cut, regardless of how early I come in or how late I stay, regardless of how much of my weekends are devoted to essays and planning, regardless of all the days that have passed without pats on the back--regardless of all of that--I find myself on a Thursday night bent over stacks of student poems, grinning. Sweating even. Putting little exclamation marks by lines I love. Thankful, so thankful, that I get to wake up and do this: teach. Dialogue with young people who are alive and aware. Smarter than they know. And hopeful.

My students teach me every day about new ways to see the world.

They teach me to write a poem. They teach me how to. They teach me that we have no real reason to be afraid. These are just words, anyway. Our scratchings at truth. And if we make them together, we will always arrive at something beautiful.

Here are Ashley's and Alyssa's poems. This spring, we are each of us full of gratitude.

The Red, Red Robin

2011-04-09T09:16:00.000-05:00

Hello 70' degree days, thunder storms, and the first sunset bike ride of the season.

And to the red, red robins everywhere, singing so prettily, promising Dairy Queen treats and earth worms-- you make me feel like a kid again, doing what I did again, singing a song!

LOVE SPRING.

Plant Literate #1: Snowdrop

2011-04-07T09:35:00.002-05:00

Loathe as I am to put "snow" in any more titles, I am happy to announce that I have selected the first of my five newly-known plants on my Thirty Before Thirty list: the galanthus nivalis, or snowdrop. Apparently there are over seventy-five varieties of this plant, and all produce white blossoms. Their greatest benefit (besides being so charming) is that they're early risers. One of my dear childhood friends has returned from two years abroad, and when she and I took a stroll through the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum last week, we were disappointed early on to see mostly browns. Stumbling across these snowdrops then was a bit like finding a pot of (white) gold. From now on, when I see them, I will think both of her and the dependability of good things coming back to us.

Ways to Say Spring

2011-04-04T09:42:00.004-05:00

in French: printemps

in Albanian: pranvera
in Romanian: primăvară

in Catalan: primavera

in Latin: ver

in Icelandic: vor

in Norweigan: vår

in Danish: forår

in German: frühling

in Estonian: kevad

in Finnish: kevät

in Persian: بهار

in Arabic: ربيع

in Basque: udaberri

in Zulu: intwasahhlobo

in Czech: jaro

in Lakota: wétu

in Japanese: 春

Or, in Me:

pretty treetops
vines

birds suddenly everywhere

promises

open streams

rushing rivers

muddy banks

rutted roads

sounds of footsteps and chirping and growth

petals

evening light

morning fog

bulbs

green berries

children in trees

rain

wet faces

hope

For the Love of Parks

2011-04-01T16:59:00.001-05:00

Some of my earliest memories involve parks. In fact, I think most of them do. What child doesn't love open spaces or mysterious woodlands to run in? And what adult--well, this adult, anyway--can't appreciate the perfection of a large swathe of land that's only purpose is to be itself? How centering is that? How necessary. So it saddens me to learn how the budget cuts in Minnesota will/might impact these important places. Thanks to Zoologirl for the alert. You really should just go to her blog and read her full response, but below is part of the Star Tribune article she quoted.

One-third of state parks could have hours reduced and services slashed under a sweeping environmental bill approved by the Minnesota House and Senate on Tuesday.

The Republican-controlled House would cut deepest, but both houses would limit spending for the environment and natural resources during the next two years to about $200 million, a trim of about $40 million from projected spending. The House and Senate proposed more cuts than DFL Gov. Mark Dayton recommended, but he makes up much of the gap with outdoor and environmental fee increases.

The reductions would hit nearly every corner of the Department of Natural Resources, the Pollution Control Agency, even the Minnesota Zoo.
DNR officials said the cuts could force a “mothballing” of up to 10 parks until state finances improve. Under the plan, the parks would remain open, but campgrounds and buildings would probably be closed and unstaffed.

I've never been much of a politico. It's just not me. And, Lord knows, as an educator I'm aware that pockets are tight and that cuts are sweeping. But here are my two-bits: I believe we need more of the natural world, not less. I believe people would find more of what they're looking for if they looked out, not down at their phones. I believe natural places impact people in overwhelmingly positive ways, and that they are worth taking care of, cherishing, and sharing with those who can be still enough to see.

Peace Like a River

2011-03-31T10:09:00.003-05:00

Such timing, this book entering my life, the landscape shifting and changing around me, just so. Come two more weeks into April, and I could not have abided a story with blizzards and below zero temperatures. Come one week earlier, and I would not have savored strong rivers and spring time like I do this day.

Also: pardon the antiquated language. This is how eleven-year-old Reuben Land talks, steeped as he is in his dad's KJB. Also, I have this terrible habit of falling in love with first-person narrators just like him, first-person narrators who believe that round and starchy words have a place on the tongue.

Peace Like a River. Minnesotan Leif Enger wrote a good one.

The book came out in 2001 and promptly garnered a bevy of accolades and "best-seller" labels. It's easy to see why. This story is nothing if not eminently readable. Let me just list some prevalent themes: family, tragedy, faith, love, adventure. You see what I mean? There is not a lot that is racy here, nothing that you wouldn't recommend to your mother or middle-school aged sister, but for the pure sake of story--character to plot to POV to scene--this tale sung for me, and really, isn't that the most important thing?

Rueben's and his family's story takes place in both Minnesota and North Dakota in the 1960s, and it's as much about miracles as it is about a family taking off in search of their outlaw brother. And, as in most adventure stories, the land--the family's last name, no less--plays a strong, sometimes miraculous, role. In an interview, Enger said it was hard for him "to fully picture a character without the ground he occupies, or his responses to new landscapes," and this to me feels exactly right. Our surroundings do play a significant role in how we experience our lives, how we think about the world, and how we tend to react to it. This is natural. Not a show, not an interview, not a Facebook status, and it's therefore a simple, accurate way to characterize. Say you're immersed in fog, for instance: Does it annoy you, do you grip the steering wheel, or does it, like Reuben says, "smell like April... [feel like something] you could weigh in a cupped hand" (141, 142)?

Say you're caught in a ground blizzard?

Say you stumble across a crack in the February earth that's spitting fire?

Say you are home again after a long time away, and it is springtime now, and there are memories you'd just as soon forget, and others you're afraid will fade? What does that look like, to you?

There is a line toward the end of the book that I love: "The pulse of the country came around me, as of voices lifted at great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words came clear, and I sang with them a beautiful and curious chant" (302).

This will make sense after you read the book, which you should, preferably before summer arrives. But even if you don't, read at least that line again. Read it out loud. And listen for the pulse that is ever under our feet.

The Birds Are Back

2011-03-28T12:13:00.000-05:00

"A Northland Spring"

2011-03-25T10:28:00.005-05:00

The thick nouns of our winter cold are soon

To disappear like shifting, soft vapor,

Like morning fog that clings as close as loons

To lake tops warmer than the April air.

When up it lifts, the skies erupt in blue

Announcing with the earth that spring has sprung.

Warm breezes! Rain! Round, cotton clouds and dew!

These greens! Such oxygen is gold for lungs.

As Northerners, we rush outdoors to sing,

To revel in the sun our skin has missed

We happily observe the birds trav'ling,

Bright promises enclosed in their twig fists.

And just as we put back mittens and hats,

We wake to white—more snow—yes, just like that.

-- by moi

Originally written for my students after a lively sonnet lesson.
Originally published in The Saint Cloud Times April 2008 Spring Poetry feature.

Flood

2011-03-22T20:00:00.002-05:00

There are three piles of snow left in the field. There was a fourth this morning. But today: steady rain.

This is when the rivers wake up.

Hello, I say to the Crow as I pass over it at dawn, the low clouds shirking light; still, there is enough of it to let me see the lid of ice that remains atop the water. Hello.

But nine hours later such calm is gone. A different child. A beast. Someone I do not wave to but run from, peer at over my shoulder as it rolls itself like flexing muscles over frozen banks, rushes up muddy fishing ledges hurling curses, careens toward the road, toward me, following my movements with Scooby-Doo eyes.

I am frightened. And thrilled.

It is like this for me with such brutal changes. I do not live in a world where landscapes stay the same, and there is always something that makes me cry.

For My Mother

2011-03-20T09:42:00.001-05:00

Memory 1: The view from my child's seat on the back of your bike as you pedaled us around Lake Ripley. It was dusk in mid-summer. Children were emerging from the lake reluctantly, water dripping from their hands and chins, sand coating their feet. We stopped to watch them. You turned back to recheck my buckles, to feed me small carrots, to swipe my hair behind my ears. "You doing okay?" I was. I remember the pink of the light.

Memory 2: Lake Shetek this time. I am older, maybe five. You and I are floating on the water upon a wide yellow air mattress. There is a heavy brick below us with a rope wrapped around it that you've tied to your big toe: an anchor, so we don't float in or float off or get too close to the reeds. There are speed boats, the hollers of skiers, the roar of cousins playing pick-up baseball on the street. But most importantly--I can tell--there is us, our conversation about what will happen next to Laura. We have been reading Little House on the Prairie. You have been reading to me. Laura's voice is your own.

Memory 3: The Badlands. The Black Hills. Harney Peak. Lake Sylvan. We have taken a family vacation to where you and Dad lived before my brother and I were born. Dad pulls the car over to the side of the road. "I can't believe it, how low the water is," you say, and we wonder, How does she know, because we cannot understand your life without us in it, not really. We only see the way you look at our father, sense that for a moment, we are gone.

Memory 4: It is the spring of my graduation year. We are in the backyard, you kneeling in the garden, me in a lawn chair, a book on my lap. I look up, the word wander on my tongue, to find you watching me. "Big changes ahead," you say. The crab apple tree behind you is a dazzle of blossoms, and when the wind rises up, the petals fall like fingerprints on your back. "I'll be okay," I say, and as the pink of your cheeks glow with equal parts sadness and pride, I know this is true because of you.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Pretty Great

2011-03-18T09:51:00.001-05:00

I had hoped to make him here (because I thought he'd enjoy quiet) or here (because I knew he'd find friends) or here (because on a girl's weekend it's always good to have a mascot). But these wintery events all passed without me turning snow into something resembling a round-bellied man. When forecasts predicted a week of all 40s and 50s, I knew my chances of completing #15 on my Thirty Before Thirty list were melting away quick.

So, with the help of some grizzled goldenrod, five hard hollow pods broken from still-standing stems, one big burly plant resembling a five-pronged pitchfork, and of course a stubby old carrot, this happened:

Ron Clark! Somehow, between rolling small snowballs into giant ones and turning earth parts into a cardigan, that is what we named him. And I say we because in the end it was my husband who called on his drive home and said, "Em, put your boots on." Hubs who made the cardigan, placed with such precision you would have thought him a tailor. And since we're both busy, him especially, and--really--who, under twelve, makes a snowman on a Monday night?--the fact that he is this good of a flesh-and-blood man is perhaps the most impressive thing of all.

He's pretty great, huh?

That's Better

2011-03-16T10:18:00.001-05:00

Dear Minnesota --

2011-03-13T10:48:00.000-05:00

Dear Minnesota --

I love you. I do. You are wide and tall and varied and beautiful and full of landscapes and corners that draw me in and whirl me out and leave me dizzy and heady and full of adulations.

But--can I just be honest, here? I'm really not a fan of all this dirt.

I like soil. I even like mud puddles in the heart of spring. But this is not soil or mud, Minnesota; this is grainy and dull and creeping stuff. This is brown surrounding every bend, brown accosting every surface, a film beneath my nails I cannot see or scrape away yet ever feel seeping into my skin.

Ehhh!

I know you can't help it. It's just who you are. We all have ugly phases. Remember middle school? But though I love you unconditionally, I must insist that this dinginess has reached it's limit (Okay, my limit. I'm being selfish, but it is me looking at you, MN, wanting--remember--to extol your virtues, so maybe help me out a bit?).

If it's all right with you, I think it's time for either spring or another blizzard. You pick.

Respectfully,

The Girl With The Wandering Eyes

(as in Costa Rica)

(I'd be fine with one more)

2011-03-08T09:57:00.005-06:00

"Blizzard"

After midnight the blizzard howls itself out,
the wind sleeps, a tired lover.
Before bed, I think of you
and play the Meistersinger quintet
over and over, singing
along on all the parts,
dancing though the house
like a polar bear who thinks
it has joined the ballet.
You are in my arms, dancing too;
whirling from room to room;
frost crusted on the window
begins to glow like lit up faces.
My five fingers, now on fire
like these five voices singing,
imagine touching the skin
over your shoulders

-- By Bill Holm

Blue

2011-03-06T09:15:00.000-06:00

Frozen Photos

2011-03-03T07:37:00.000-06:00

Forgive me: I don't leave early enough in the morning. I am eager to get home to dinner at night. I don't stop. I don't slow the car, pull over, slip my feet into boots and traipse across iced savannahs. I have not captured these places with what we onced called film.

But there are several images that I've seen this last month, and loved:

1) Fence poles, stark and gray against an afternoon sky, slices of shadow splicing the snow. They are straight and crooked and lonely. Yet brave. They remind me of thin children in a school yard lined up to jump rope.

2) Sand dunes that are snow dunes, Antarctic ridges that are Saharan ridges. Hills that rise up, their wide bodies tinged with blue, into a blue-white sky.

3) Thick snow on the roads. At 6:07 a.m--the morning black except for headlights and all this otherwordly visiting white--I think, We tell ourselves we have settled this land, cut through it cleanly from one city to the next--but we are all visitors. We are swimmers. It is easy enough to be moved.

And the one that haunts me most:

4) The three tall maple trees to the south of Highway 7, up high on the ridge line. They stand like sisters, bathed in early light, robed in gold. I look to them each morning for a sign. I'm not sure why. I glance at their branches, half-expecting to one day see an arm, a hand, a thousand fingers pointing me east or west.

"On Winter's Margin"

2011-02-28T09:55:00.001-06:00

On winter’s margin, see the small birds now
With half-forged memories come flocking home
To gardens famous for their charity.
The green globe’s broken; vines like tangled veins
Hang at the entrance to the silent wood.

With half a loaf, I am the prince of crumbs; 
By snow’s down, the birds amassed will sing
Like children for their sire to walk abroad! 
But what I love, is the gray stubborn hawk
Who floats alone beyond the frozen vines; 
And what I dream of are the patient deer
Who stand on legs like reeds and drink that wind; -

They are what saves the world: who choose to grow
Thin to a starting point beyond this squalor.

-- By Mary Oliver

Winter Air

2011-02-26T11:36:00.005-06:00

Find more of Robin's lovely voice (both the musical and literary variety) here and here.