Went for dinner tonight at Osaka. I love their sashimi special roll. It felt like cheating on Kate though, since I don’t recall ever having gone there without her. So, I called her. She reported that the romantic Russian composer street house had an uneven first level, a studio that would have required $50,000 to bring up to code, no space to hang art and too many steps. That’s why we sent her out there. No regrets.
She’s still looking, has her eye on a particular place. She plans to drive around by herself tomorrow, looking at houses, then she and Ann Beck will resume on Tuesday.
While I waited at the Wings Joint on Friday, I picked up a paper I only read when I’m there, Tidbits. It had some aphorisms called old farmer’s advice. Not sure they’re from old farmers, or farmers at all, but I found a few of them amusing:
Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight, and bull-strong.
Keep skunks and bankers at a distance.
Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.
And, my favorite: Don’t pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old fight, he’ll just kill you.
Let me explain. In 1975 I began a year long internship at Bethlehem-Steward Presbyterian Church at the corner of 26th St. and Pleasant Ave. The focus of this work was neighborhood ministry, finding out what the needs of the area were and responding to them in some concrete fashion. This was work I could do and did not involve me in the more philosophically ambiguous (for me) worship, educational and pastoral life of a local congregation.
Over the course of those years, which included a good deal of time at South Central Ministry, based out of the old Stewart Presbyterian building which sits three blocks south of Lake Street on Stevens Avenue right next to the freeway sound barriers, my work at South Central was even more politically and neighborhood focused than at Bethlehem-Stewart.
That was when I found the Wings Joint. It was run by a Chinese guy and sat on Nicollet, maybe 8 blocks south of Lake Street. These were the best wings I’d ever had. Crispy, always moist on the inside and just a bit of zing, which could be amped up with the hot sauce. At the end of my day (often after 10 pm) at South Central, I’d stop by the wings joint, pick up some wings, then buy a six-pack of beer and get started on both on my way home. This was one of those urban equivalents of a special bay on a lake or a place with rare plant species in a forest, a unique haven, a place with qualities you could find no where else.
Then, I moved away from South Central and away from every week visits to the Wing Joint, though I would still, on occasion, go back to it.
When we moved to Andover, it seemed that all those unique finds, gathered over many years of wandering the streets and inner city neighborhoods of Minneapolis and St. Paul, would disappear.
Imagine my surprise when I read in a newspaper article that the Wings Joint had moved to Blaine. Blaine! I knew where that was now. So, I hunted down the the Wings Joints new spot. It’s in a strip mall with little presence, concrete block buildings with a Subway, an Asian grocery store and a Nail joint. But it was the same place. The same wings.
So on occasion, as I did Friday after dropping Kate at the airport, I take off Highway 610 at University and drive north, well into what used to be the heart of Blaine, stopped at the Wings Joint and enjoyed their atmosphere, unchanged from the Lake Street days. At least in my memory.
When we move to the mountains, to a state far away, all these special places: urban havens, Scientific and Natural Areas, places along Lake Superior will be lost. Not disappeared, of course not, but there will be no equivalent surprise of finding that unique Denver spot all of a sudden taken up residence in Idaho Springs. I don’t have the memories.
Making those equivalent memories in Colorado is something I look forward to, that slow accumulation of local knowledge, but the utility of all that Minnesota knowledge will fade away, useful only for the very occasional trip back.
11 hours of sleep last night, a nap this afternoon, by tomorrow I’ll be back in the land of the fully awake, a state I try to encourage on as many levels as possible. Still feeling a bit numb from the sudden whirlwind of energy about the Tchaikovsky Road house. I didn’t mention that it had a great address, 329 romantic Russian composer street.
I remember, come to think of it, another stupid state, finals stupid. Just before, during and in the immediate aftermath of final exams my world would narrow to streams of data, large chunks of ideas and my focus would be tight. Cooking was ramen noodles, mac and cheese. Lots of coffee, pencils, outlines and summaries. Finals stupid and move stupid are very similar though move stupid has occupied a longer period of time. They both simplify and constrict the flow of information, ratcheting down to those matters relevant to the task.
It’s simplification and constriction that produce the effect, the shoving out of irrelevances, pushing them to the periphery and maintaining attention, a most precious cognitive resource, where it needs to be. But these are not states I would want to last very long. They produce an intense concentration on particular results, necessary, yes, but there are other pursuits that call to me.
Kate’s in Gilpin County right now, or on her way there, looking at the house we both liked. She’ll see several others over today and Monday.
Meanwhile I slept from 11 pm last night until 10 this morning. All that house hunting energy that kept me awake yesterday morning dissipated and left me sleep deprived. Got up at 5:45 am to feed the dogs, back to bed at 5:59. Being sleep deprived is difficult for me, I don’t like the feeling, call it sleep stupid, and my backup personality comes closer to the surface. That is, impatient, easy to anger. Well, it’s my backup personality in my estimation.
Maybe, it just struck me, that sleep deprivation puts me in a particular mood and keeps me there for the duration. I’ve become intrigued with moods recently. Moods are the local weather of the psyche while personality is the climate. Maybe I experience temporary global warming heating up my weather during sleep deprivation.
Gotta go outside and strengthen the silt fencing again. Rigel, and in her trail, Vega were playing in the resurfaced area, the part where we had to have a bobcat take care of their efforts over the last three years.
In this moment Kate’s the scout and I’m the homesteader. Gotta go done homesteader stuff.
Saw an ad for Army Strong. Well, I’m move stupid. There seemed little room this week for Latin or leisure reading or relaxing into an idea, letting the mind drift. Yes, a bit of time for art but even at the Walker I felt rushed. Thank goodness the garden has gone to bed. Sleep tight, baby.
These pursuits, which I consider my normal activity, the stuff that gets me up in the morning and excited about the day after, have been crowded out by movers, mortgages, the hunt for a new home, diving-Scrooge McDuck like-into our finances, tweeking and checking, ordering the septic tank pumped out, figuring out medicare when we move, a long list of things, intensified by meeting with the stager and the realtor on Wednesday.
These are all boxes that require check marks. So, it’s not like this is optional activity.
And, yes, the move gets more exciting as we press further along. It got very real last night and this morning.
Poking around on a real estate website, I found a house I wanted. Kate agreed. It was in our price range, in a location we considered desirable, with an idiosyncratic design. It’s sort of a conch shell turned broad side down with smaller areas as you move up.
Last night I got so excited I had trouble sleeping. We had to move on this right away. I just knew it. That was where the tweeking and checking came in. And so. When we did move on it around 9:30 am, we found that an offer had gone in earlier this morning. And, most likely, was accepted. But, we could make a second offer. Since we’d only seen pictures we couldn’t do that blind.
Kate left this afternoon for Colorado for a viewing of this house and a few others. We probably won’t get it, just a half-inch too late. But we have no chance if Kate doesn’t evaluate it and decide whether we put in a second-place offer. We got her on a Spirit airlines flight scheduled to leave at 2:07. She called me at 3:45 to say, “Guess where I am?” Terminal 2? Yep.
All this made the whole process more intense for a few hours. More imminent. I imagine I’ll be move stupid for days, if not weeks to come.
At the Walker. Shocked out of my move fixation, gladly so. What I hoped for. A major exhibition covering years when art turned over on itself and the Walker made its reputation as a nationally significant contemporary art space, Art Expanded, 1958–1978, challenges boring old representational painting, stiff granite sculpture, and anything else considered traditional or usual at the time.
It got me immediately into careful looking, following disinhibited artists as they struggled to use a radical new freedom, going with them to places absurd and funny. An example of the latter is a small notation for a happening: Turn the radio on, turn it off at the first sound. This zeitgeist was mine as a young adult, traditional sexual mores, traditional career paths, traditional power structures, traditional decorum was all suspect and suspect in such a way that the burden of proving itself useful to the human project lay on tradition.
The Walker is an osmotic membrane, the world of art pushes at its curators and they try to let through only the most innovative, most balls against the wall, most beautiful, most lyrical of the very new. It is an antidote to burying myself in the minutiae of moving. So easy to do. Artists trying to replace sculpture with three video screens, two larger and one smaller between them, stacked vertically, with strings like those of a bass arranged in front of the screens and a stool behind for the screenist to use while playing push me away from the taskiness of the move and back into the realm of, “Oh! What’s this?” A place I consider my natural habitat.
So it did not surprise me when I sat down to eat lunch that my mind strayed to a mind-full meal. It went like this. I had a fruit salad and a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich. Fork into grape. Huh. Roots captured water, distributed it up a vine and into the developing fruit, swelling this taut case until it was full. The leaves captured solar energy and created carbohydrates. Sweet. Wine. Kate and I at the KSNJ dinner on Kate’s 70th. Mogen David. A melon. Kate makes melon salads every summer, puts them in a long plastic container and we eat them throughout the week. Pineapple chunk. A happy worker makes good fruit. The Dole plantation philosophy on Lanai, now abandoned to the techno-baron Larry Eliot and his desire to create a sustainable, profitable community. Strawberry. California’s Central Valley. Drought. The precious water contained in this strawberry might have come from last year’s snow pack in the Rocky Mountains. Then, the bread. I don’t eat bread anymore, but half a grilled cheese sounded so good. I went ahead. Diabetes. Why do the things I like a lot turn out to be bad for me? Days of grilled cheese and Campbell’s tomato soup. An Alexandria, Indiana gourmet lunch.
Now this is not mindful in the way of savoring the grape as a tight oval, bursting with juice, breaking the skin with sharp front teeth and feeling the first squirt of liquid on the tongue sort of mindful. No, this is a mind-full lunch in which I allowed free association to guide and slow my eating. The blueberries. Those Augusts on the North Shore wandering through burned over or clear cut forests, gathering wild berries, eating as many as I picked. The blueberries we have outside in our orchard. That sort of mind-full.
A primary text in my rethinking, reimagining my faith is Becoming Native to This Place by Wes Jackson of the Land Institute. It’s not the content of the book-though it has useful material about new ways of agriculture-but the gerund phrase it has as its title.
Becoming native. What an idea. The very notion of native is that you can’t be native unless you’re born to it. So what can this mean, becoming native? In my understanding it’s about a process, a careful listening and seeing. Casey Reams, a soil scientist, was notable for saying, “See what you’re looking at.” So often we don’t.
We will never be native to a place where we were not born, but we might enter a state of grace with the land, a “becoming native” state, an ongoing increased intimacy and sense of co-creation. When Kate and I landed here in Andover 20 years ago, I was far from what I understood then as my native turf, the streets and inner city neighborhoods of Minneapolis and St. Paul. But, as I wrote here a few days ago, I’ve actually spent most of my life in small and medium sized towns of the midwest, 47 of 67 years. So, I became native, or entered into a state of becoming native to the city.
Becoming native is not achievable from the couch or from books or from yearning. It begins when, as the New Testament says of Jesus’ disciples, you shake the dust off your sandals and finally leave the other place behind. Whatever it is. Becoming native begins when you commit, often unconsciously, to the new place.
After 19 years in Indiana, where I was raised; I lived in Wisconsin for a year, Appleton, and never felt like I landed. By the time 20 years of residency in Minneapolis/St. Paul came and went, its streets were my streets, its future my future. Becoming native happened gradually and unconsciously.
Here in Andover, where I initially felt out of place (a cliche I use deliberately here), becoming native followed a somewhat more conscious path. We decided to put landscaping work into the mortgage and added terrain features such as boulder walls, a tiered perennial garden and several plantings of trees and perennial flowers and shrubs. Initially, the gardening work was bulbs and annuals, almost exclusively in the tiered bulbs above our brick patio.
There were though, several black locust trees in a grove about 40 feet off our back deck. That area, sort of a backyard, had weeds and these trees. Black locust is a dense wood and one often used for fence posts in the 19th and early 20th century. They also have thick, wicked thorns. It was the work of a couple of years, with chain-saw and step-son, before those trees were gone and the stumps had been ground away.
After the bulbs and the annuals, the felling of the black locust grove, attended by sweat and days of heavy labor, including sessions with a rented industrial quality wood-chipper, began to reel me into this place. The soil and manual labor, outdoors work, gave me an intimacy with the grounds I’d never had anyplace else.
Add in the dogs of those years, the planting of this garden and that, the eventual creation of the raised beds, the orchard, the fire-pit and we began to become one with the land here. The bees provided a collegial work force from the insect world.
The house hosted birthday parties, holiday meals, meetings with the Woolly Mammoths, the Sierra Club and parties for Paul Wellstone’s first campaign. Over time this land became home.
Then, becoming native to this place could truly begin. I would mark the moment of crossing the threshold late one fall night, perhaps in November when I heard a scratching outside the study window. Turning off the light in the room I moved closer to the window and looked out at a bird feeder then set up nearby. There, scratching among the fallen seeds was an adult opossum. This was the first opossum I had ever seen live outside of a zoo. He came back several nights, then disappeared, perhaps eaten, perhaps gone into hibernation.
In thinking about the possibility of hibernation I began to see this property in a new way. According to the Minnesota Extension Service and the DNR, there were likely thousands of animals: chipmunks, voles, opossums among them hibernating here in our woods. An image, a vision really, of our land with many, many lives lying below ground or in tree hollows came to me.
It was that vision that awoke me to the fact that we shared this property with so many others. It was not our property anymore than it was theirs. We were cohabitants. And not only with animals. The jack-in-pulpit, the columbine, the wild grape and wild cucumber, virginia creeper, the lilies and the iris, the tulips and the daffodils, the garlic and the asparagus, they all rested here over the winter waiting springs touch to come out into the sun.
An anthropocentric notion of ownership, amplified by deeds and by the very process we go through now, selling this property, creates an illusion of our habitation here as the only significant one. Many people would, without much thought, identify humans as the only inhabitant of the land. And it is not so.
Here there are whistle pigs, raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks, voles, the occasional wandering muskrat and rat, salamanders great and small, newts, garter snakes, toads and frogs, snapping turtles at certain seasons, pileated woodpeckers, great horned owls, crows and geese. There are millions, probably billions, of microscopic flora and fauna that keep our soil vital and nourishing for the larger plants that live within it.
This is a hectare of land, 2.5 acres. It has oak, ash, poplar, ironwood, elm, cedar, buckthorn (grrr), snowberry, river birch, maple, pine and spruce. There are many native and many domesticated plants and six domesticated animals, four dogs and two humans.
Once this umwelt settled into my conscious and unconscious awareness I knew I was becoming native to this place. I will never be as native to it as the generations of rabbits that have lived and died here. Nor will I be as native as any of the other animals or the native flora. Perhaps I have become as native here as the daffodils in our gardens and the lilies, both flowers that thrive on this land just as Kate and I have.
And now we are selling. What does that mean? Really? A certain sum of money, often transferred from one mortgage bank to another, changes hands. Legal documents get signed. Keys handed over. On some day we see our goods loaded onto a truck, we get in our Rav4 and pull out of the driveway never to return. But our cohabitants will remain, snugged into their tree cavity, their underground burrow, their nests beneath the shed. The major natural character of this place will remain largely intact. Sales are about humans, mostly, unless new “owners” abuse their trust.
We will, I think, go through a process of denativizing in which we gradually let go of the sensibilities shaped by these woods, these plants, these animals, these cohabitants. Even if we visit someday, just to see how the old place is getting on, we will return not as natives but as travelers, historical tourists.
We will, I hope, be becoming native to a new place, one with hard rock and high peaks, faraway vistas and remarkable spring snows. But it will not be easy. We will have to earn our place there, just as we have here. Frankly, it’s the part of this journey that most excites me. Yes, the grandchildren. Of course. Yes, Jon and Jen and Barb. Of course. But as to my life and its daily turn, becoming native to the Rocky Mountains is the big joy ahead of me.
Explanatory signs along the way west. This is the meeting with the realtors and their stager. In this meeting the homeowner learns the best way to present their home, a symbol of their uniqueness, in as bland a way as possible so that others can project their own uniqueness upon it. When imagined as one’s own, a home is sold.
Tomorrow we get guidance on the interior work from a person whose expertise lies in arranging homes for sale. We’ve now done as much as we intend to do with the outside, have packed maybe 60% of the things that will go with us, decumulated (yes, that’s a word. Surprisingly, I rediscovered in a much older post, one from October 2005) multiple items of furniture, art and objets d’art, books, files through sale, discarding and donating.
There are, too, the many other matters, financial and insurance matters in particular, that need attention, some of which we can do now and some of which have to wait until we change residence.
Each one of these milestones could have its own little sign, like the text next to an art object in a museum or a plant in an arboretum. Here the mover learns the art of letting go. Here the mover often tears out individual hairs one by one. Or, here a look of glee often passes over the mover.
And the sound of chain saws was heard on the land. The landscaping work has begun. A bobcat, pulled by a truck filled with mulch sits just ahead of a white pick-up with an enclosed trailer. The dogs announce, over and over again, that there are strangers here. Strangers here. Strangers here.
The steady rate of work toward Colorado goes on. We’ve been at this now since late April. It can feel like we’ve always been moving. Always will be moving. But an end exists and it’s much closer now than it was when we first decided to give the whole process two years. As we grabbed hold of this project, various aspects of it have conspired to make moving early next year the best plan.
Though not eager to leave Minnesota, we are eager to start establishing a new life in the mountains. We’ve lived here over well over 40 years, both of us, and our Western life will take time to flourish, just as this one did.
We will have the grandkids, Jon and Jen, and Barb (Tennessee grandma) to help us ease in. Kate says there’s a top 10 quilt shop (in the U.S.) within 40 miles of Idaho Springs so that will give her a place to make new friends. The Sierra Club and other environmental advocacy groups are strong in Colorado, as are certain brands of progressive politics, so I’ll have some places to meet new people, too.
But none of this until after the landscaping is done.
A bit more cleaning up, decluttering, then a walk through to agree on work we’re going to do tomorrow when Kate’s sister Anne comes up. This is outside work, harvesting the last of the vegetables, cleaning up the beds and putting down the broadcast fertilizer. There’s pruning and hose retrieving, wheel barrows and garden art to come in for the move.
Dehn’s landscaping comes on Monday at 8 a.m. to do front yard work. This is for curb appeal for the most part.
Then on Wednesday the realtor’s and the stager come. Once we settle on what we need to do inside, we’ll figure out when to do it, probably as late as possible, then find someone.
We’re definitely on the downward slope of the curve, but even as we near the bottom there are still many tasks that remain. It’s important now to recall all we’ve done to get to this point. And how daunting the move would look if we had done nothing.
This illustration shows the true nature of the task. The darker orange curve represents packing, arranging details like a second mortgage and movers, all those things that are Minnesota focused and aimed at getting our portable items from here to Colorado. That’s the curve on which we’ve reached the downward slope.
The lighter orange curve represents finding a new home in Colorado, moving in, getting our life altogether shifted from Minnesota to Colorado: buying, updating and moving into a new home, health insurance, driver’s license, estate plan plus all the smaller things like identifying a car dealership, a pharmacy, a grocery store, utilities. On that curve we’ve barely begun to climb the upward slope.
My guess is that the time it takes to extricate ourselves from Andover will match the amount of time it will take us to get the new life begun. How long it will take to have a new, Colorado life? Years, I imagine.
