Category Archives: Minnesota

Cheese Curds

August 22, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon

State Fair. A Lughnasa festival writ large. Texas and Minnesota, 1 & 2 in terms of state fair attendance. So Minnesota’s is big. And filled with the improbable from seed art to deep-fried pickles on a stick. Princess Kay of the Milky Way gets immortalized in butter, meaning there is an occupational niche for, yes, butter sculptor.

(Antrim, Ireland. Old Lammas Fair.)

The cows and the pigs and the horses and the chickens and the llamas and the rabbits and the pigeons and the sheep are all here in the city now, rooted out of their familiar stalls or sheds or fields, loaded in wagons and driven into the concrete jungle that is St. Paul, or Falcon Heights if you’re going to be picky.

The DNR has the great pond with Minnesota fish, right across from the giant slide where the gunny sacks serve as seats. Along the street that runs to the main entrance and you hit cheese curds fried and politicians hoping to avoid being fried.

Then there’s machinery hill where, like the livestock, farm machinery comes into the city for a few days. The tractors seem at home there, a place they belong as much as in the field following the gps to the other end of the furrow.

And the people, walking arm in arm, carrying a WCCO bag, a bunch of colorful brochures and printed information from the DNR, colleges, that wonderful gizmo the hawker made seem magical. They might be eating honey ice cream, purchased at the bee exhibit run by members of the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association.

Carried above the noise and crush of the crowds are ringing bells, flashing lights with their lustre lost in the daylight. The Fair’s id, the Midway. Riding, swooping, throwing, carrying big soft bears no one would buy. Where pointlessness is exactly the point.

It’s all underway right now, through Labor Day. This one will be our last as Minnesota residents and we’re going, probably on Monday. I’ll be headed for the cheese curds.

Minnesota

State Fair

July 16, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Most Heat Moon

The world cup is over. The all star game is behind us. Fourth of July has come. And gone. The next big event in the state is the State Fair. Our State Fair is a phenomenon, one of the last great State Fairs. Texas, which draws 3 million visitors a year, is #1. But, then Texas is #2 in population and Minnesota is #22. Minnesota’s state fair ranks #2 with 1.6 million visitors a year.

A few years back I toured a group of Chilean college students through the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. While spending time in the photography gallery, we came to a set featuring the state fair. After they finished exploring the photographs and listening to my explanation, they all agreed these were their favorite works in the museum. Also, they wanted to return to Minnesota to attend the fair. I don’t know if they did, but I know if they did, they would not have been disappointed.

It’s been awhile since I went to the fair with any regularity, but I’ll be there this year since it might be my last while I’m a resident.

Family, Minnesota

Rules of the Game

July 9, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Most Heat Moon

Ruth and I played blackjack tonight. I dealt and she still won. Just going into third grade, her math skills are more than up to the game and her betting showed some uncanny, if randomly lucky, skills, too. She had played some version of the game in school with her teacher, but the real game is a bit harsher, less forgiving. That’s the one I play and the one I taught her.

Cards have been part of my life since I began delivering newspapers. My parents weren’t game players of any sort, so all the card skills I’ve developed came away from home. Starting at age 8, I would gather with ten or fifteen other young boys in a wooden shed where we waited while the old press rumbled through the daily run of the Alexandria Times-Tribune. Sometimes the web would break, the web is a v-shaped piece of metal that folded the newsprint as it came through the press, ready to become a newspaper. This would require much cussing and hurrying on the part of the printers, but it also meant that sometimes our games extended well past the usual half hour or so.

Later, in junior high I began playing poker with a regular group of guys and our game continued through high school. Once in college I veered toward bridge, playing duplicate bridge in a local league and endless hands in an endless game in the student union. After college, the people I knew well, my friends and work colleagues, didn’t play cards, so I set aside that long history.

Only lately, in the past 4 or 5 years, have I picked up regular cards again, playing the five handed version of sheepshead that I report on here occasionally.

Still, I have many hours of card playing behind me and the memory of it has given me an excellent “card sense.” Card sense carries across various sorts of games and refers to an intuitive knowledge of how a hand might develop.

I may not knit or sew, have carpentry skills or fix-it talent, but I can teach my grandchildren how to gamble. An odd realization, but there it is.

Anoka County, Family, Garden, Great Work, Memories, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, Retirement, Sierra Club, The Move, Third Phase, Writing

A House With A History

June 23, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Summer Moon

Why not write a history of this spot, this hectare? An ecological history. It can start with the glaciations, consider the flora and fauna since then, focusing in more tightly once the first nations began to arrive, then even more tightly as Minnesota began to emerge.

Another starting spot would be today, or from Kate and mine’s presence here. How we decided to be here, why. Go over decisions we made early on like hiring a landscape designer at the beginning. Recount our twenty years, the good decisions and the bad ones, the easy ones and the hard ones. The other historical and geological material could be worked in as backstory.

It would be good for people to view an average approach to the land, one which changed over time (though its roots were indeed in the back to the land movement) and which took advantage not of a particular approach, but of many. An approach that is dynamic, changing with new knowledge, the seasons, aging, new plants and new desire.

The flavor of “Return of the Secaucus 7” with some Scott and Helen Nearing, Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry thrown in, too. Ah, perhaps it could be a sort of third phase update of the movement years, an upper middle class idyll moving against the grain of upper middle class lifestyles.

Not sure whether to pursue this or not, but it could be interesting. Might even help sell the house. A house with a history.

A structure based on the Great Wheel might be interesting.

Anoka County, Dogs, Friends, Minnesota

Nighttime Fireworks

June 13, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Summer Moon

It’s night time in the exurbs. The full summer moon lights up the neighbors lighting up the sky. With fireworks. Yes, our neighbors have a fascination with fireworks, a fascination that seems to strike them most often around 10 pm. And no, I don’t know why.

We have two dogs with mild thunder phobias and the fireworks often set them whining. I don’t blame them. They make me whine, too. The dogs though can’t know that the neighbors are, for the most part, peaceable and friendly. The other part being the 10 pm fireworks, of course.

They seem to have gone silent. Nope. Another one. Gertie’s upset. The nights around the 4th and the night of the 4th itself are the worst.

Just let Gertie in the bedroom. That’s her safe place when there’s thunder or fireworks. Rigel’s ok if she’s with her sis, Vega. If not, she heads for the small hallway coming in from the garage. Enclosed and dark.

It would be nice to find a place without even these signs of human habitation. Out there. You know. Colorado.

Commentary on the news, Minnesota, News of the Strange

Minnesota Whacko: Addendum

May 7, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

OK, I thought John LaDue, Byron White and the corpse containing RV were enough to maintain our international standing, but I’m glad to see that the Zumberge family, all three of them, have jumped into a possible sanity breach. Here’s a quote from today’s Star-Tribune:

“Shoot, shoot, shoot, keep shooting,” Zumberge’s wife allegedly said as he fired a 12-gauge, semiautomatic shotgun at his neighbors.

This was apparently the culmination of a 15 year feud over the Zumberge’s neighbors feeding of deer. The Zumberges didn’t like it.

Son, Jacob, apparently pushed the neighbors at a local VFW, and then promised to “burn down their house and kill them.” According to the Tribune he felt the neighbor, dubbed “Mr. Corn” by the Zumberges in letters of complaint, contributed to his father getting Lyme’s disease.

(one of many shotguns available for purchase at a nearby Walmart.)

After Neal Zumberge emerged from his basement through a window, he emptied his semi-automatic shotgun. In a laconic observation the paper also reported that “four empty 12-gauge shotgun shells were found near (the neighbor’s) front door.”

Commentary on the news, Minnesota

Minnesota Whacko

May 5, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

John David LaDue. Byron White. An RV with extra cargo. Geez, Minnesota. A dedicated Columbine-massacre aspirant, a cold-blooded killer of teens and that smell, oh, that’s just the body we left there. We told you not to open the front compartments. Each one of these stories makes national and international news because, because they’re so damned odd.

How about the knife and axe throwing kid who has a storage room filled with bomb-making materials, more guns that needed to take down a white-tail and carefully thought out plan to kill his family, deploy a diversion and then slaughter as many classmates as possible. A quiet kid.

The aging security professional who parked his truck away from home then sat in wait for the burglars who’d targeted him. No, I’m not excusing the burglary. I’m commenting on the predator nature of the trap and the vermin comments and the gap between wounding and killing. Of several hours.

Get the guys together for a bachelor party, hire an RV and drive it to the Kentucky Derby. What could go wrong? Nothing, really, except for renting a vehicle that had a 23-year old man’s corpse in a front storage area. I liked the groom’s spirit though. They rented a hotel room, watched the Wild in the Stanley Cup playoffs, then headed north to watch the Derby at Canterbury.

Now we all know there were many other sane and good things going on here over the last couple of weeks but to the outside world we completely whacko. And not in a funny, haha, sort of way. Nope, in a psychopathic violent sort of way.

Whatever happened to the place where everybody’s good-looking and the kids are above average? Let’s see. Keillor grew up in Anoka. Where was the RV owners home again? Oh. Anoka.

Commentary on the news, Memories, Minnesota, Politics, Third Phase

20-20-20

April 5, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Continuing the city theme from the post below. I live in the exurbs now, just two or three miles or so north of us corn fields begin and our development is a small cul de sac of homes that jut out into a working truck garden. The MUSA line, the intended sprawl container of the Met Council, runs a mile south of us. Beyond it a city cannot extend sewer connections. That’s why we have a septic system and our own well.

But before I lived in the city. First Minneapolis, then St. Paul. In fact, over dinner with Kate, I realized I spent roughly 20 years in a small town, 20 years in the city and now have spent 20 years in the exurbs. Those 20 years in the city were where I found my milieux. The mix it up, bare knuckle politics of neighborhood economic development, labor organizing and straight political work appealed to my middle adult need for agency.

The varieties of problems, the mix of people, the different communities, the history rushing into the present all exhilarated me. In the city years I wanted, needed to make change, get things done, improve life. And through fortunate relationships with many active folks I had a chance to participate in some interesting and worthwhile projects.

In the exurban years I’ve retreated, pulled back into my own work, writing, learning, gardening, sharing life with Kate and the dogs. It was time to do that, to pull back. That’s even more clear these days.

Here’s an example. A number of young activists, the age of my city years, especially environmentally focused activists lobby for urban density. They want to tear down parts of old neighborhoods and build apartment buildings. These are the same folks who advocate for bicyclists, mass transit and against urban sprawl. They look at the city and say the way to stop sprawl is to keep people in the center city. How do you do that? Build up.

In my years in the city we stopped apartment buildings, advocated neighborhood level decision making and tried to make communities stronger through increasing economic development. These are different times and I understand the arguments of those who want denser urban areas. Not only do I understand them, but I agree with them. But fulfilling those policies often means riding over the protests of folks in the neighborhood.

This is one of those instances where momentum and the needs of the time have shifted thinking. I can approve from afar, but I wouldn’t be able to wade into the politics. I’d be too conflicted. In that situation it’s best I’m removed from the scene. Out here tending our garden.

Dogs, Family, Minnesota

Careening Out of February

February 23, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

The dogs were quiet this morning. I slept in until 8:30. When I came out to the kitchen, they looked up at me, happy to see me and I let them outside. Gertie, our self-anointed early morning canine agitator, was quiet this morning. Why? No idea. She has slept in her crate the last two nights rather than in our bedroom. Maybe that explains some of it. Whatever it was, I’d like to see it again tomorrow.

(Gertie’s got her head out the furthest.)

After the worst snow event since the 1991 Halloween blizzard, we’re settling into another week of polar vortex style cold. Looks like we’re going to slide out of February on a Red Bull crashed-ice course.

Over the last day or so the snow lining the branches of the shrubs and trees has begun to melt in the now much warmer sun, more light on less square feet of earth. As it melts, though, it freezes back because the air temperature around it is still way below freezing. This has created some beautiful instances of clear ice topped snow, as if many of the snow-covered branches have sprouted diamond tiaras. Now presenting, Miss Euonymus. And for Miss Congeniality, the entrant from the oak hill, Miss Dogwood.

Kate’s going to stay at the quilt retreat an extra night so she can watch the Winter Olympics’ closing ceremonies. I’ll go get her tomorrow morning, after the roads have cleared. I’ve sat out the entire storm, taking Kate up to Rogers late morning on Thursday, then sitting right here, where I plan to stay until I leave to get her tomorrow.

Minnesota, Weather +Climate

Ice Cold. Superior.

February 5, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

from the Updraft Blog: “Today’s MPR News weather spy Jay Austin is a professor at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and the Large Lakes Observatory. He sends along the news this morning that Lake Superior has completely frozen over, a month ahead of schedule for years when the big lake reaches complete ice cover.

Here’s the brief but attention getting email Jay sent my way this morning.”

Superior is completely ice covered