A woman of two cities

The Dakota named their home, "The Land Where the Water Reflects the Clouds." 

A name full of shining sacredness, and thus the best kind of name. 

The Europeans who took the land from the Dakota and the Ojibwe called it "The Land of 10,000 Lakes." 

They built two cities, side by side, on both banks of the Mississippi River.

Before I continue this tale, there are some things you need to understand. For context.

Minneapolis is the City of Lakes. This is where I was born, and where my parents were born, and where I have lived for 99 percent of my life. Except for the river gorge, it stands on flat terrain, where the Chain of Lakes and wetlands reflect the sky. Scando-protestant-hipster-liberal. 

St. Paul is the Capitol City. St. Paul is the older, smaller, hillier city, with more historic buildings and old neighborhoods than Minneapolis--Irish-Catholic-traditional DFL-blue collar. 

So to simplify greatly, St. Paul, history. Minneapolis, lakes. 

But both river. The Mississippi manages to snake through both downtown hearts, even though they are 10 miles apart. 

Native Minneapolitans rarely move to St. Paul, and vice versa. 

It's just how it is. 

But if they're me, chances are they will end up working in St. Paul quite often. Like I am now. 

Every morning, I drive from Minneapolis to St. Paul over the Meeting of the Waters, Mendota, where the Mississippi joins the Minnesota River.  I sneak glances through the highway bridge railings at the river, and it looks like a wide, blank expanse of snow. If it weren't for the Cottonwoods that delineate its banks, and the fact that there is a bridge over it, you wouldn't know a wild river slept beneath. All appears still.

But I know the river is napping with one eye open, alive and restless even in winter, its water brown as a hibernating bear and bristling with ice crystals, creeping through ever-rushing arteries within the frozen architecture of its slumber.

As I cast my eyes outward, I see too the mystical island at the confluence of the rivers, the sacred place that the Dakota considered to be the center of all things, where their stories tell that humankind was created.

Remember the times I have walked across the sandy flood plain of that island--a somehow-hushed, between-the-worlds, silver-green place, even with the traffic from the bridge rushing over and the droning of jets overhead and the occasional speedboat sending the river water washing against the low banks.

I do not like its modern name so I won't write it here. The island's sacredness can't be hemmed in by powerlines or desecrated by broken treaties...it is native to the place, unconquerable. That's what I tell myself, when I see it beset on all sides by civilization, so that I don't feel as sad.

But at times it is meet and right to feel sad, isn't it?

For most of the trip I follow a road at the base of the river bluffs, close to the Mississippi. If only I had a way of taking photos as I drive. My hungry eyes take sustenance from the sights each morning--the fairyland of snow-covered trees in a ravine, the bold, medieval hulk of a grain elevator against the sky, billows of pale pink and lavender steam-clouds unfolding from smokestacks in the morning sunlight. 

This is what I see after I get out of the car...thus I share a small part of my daily journey with you, wherever you are. 

The St. Paul Cathedral on Cathedral Hill, the view to my left...

...the Minnesota State Capitol, the view to my right...

...the young river birch maidens I pass on my daily walk from the parking lot to the building...

...looking toward the Cathedral, lofty Austrian pines...and the entrance to the history museum where I work, which has taken up residence between the domes of St. Paul.

There are so many kinds of history, and there is no history without a story. The one that is calling to me is the story of this land itself. I don't mean Minnesota as a political entity, but something deeper and older and bigger than that: this Place that was loved by the native peoples who knew it and honored it and cared for it and were part of its story for centuries upon centuries.

I'm coming to understand that there is so little I understand about being a part of the essential Here.

Is this making any sense? I realize I write things like this rather often. More than half a century of living, and sometimes I wonder what it is I've been doing up to this point. Is that how everyone feels as they grow older? That maybe it takes years to even begin to ask the right questions?

I feel I'm a child in the world, even now, in all that I'd like to understand. I'm curious. Once again, I'm hot on the trail of something. Might get hold of it, might not, but no matter; I'm sure to find something.

Maybe I'll start this round with the museum store. It has many books on Dakota culture. I have a lunch hour and an employee discount.


P.S. And perfectly in line with Raquel's intuition on this, I was guided to an excellent post on Priscilla Stuckey's blog, This Lively Earth, about her journey in relationship and spiritual helpers.

Comfort food

My mother gardened bare-handed.

She took joy in burying both hands in the soil, happy to sit in peaceful companionship with earthworms and bumblebees.

She was the only mother in our neighborhood who planted vegetables, read "Organic Gardening" magazine and knew what a beneficial nematode was. She made us yogurt and Tiger’s Milk, put wheat germ in our home-baked bread. There was no soda pop in our refrigerator, ever. (She would buy Cap’n Crunch cereal when we begged her to.)

I've been especially thinking about my mother lately. I've been down with back-to-back illnesses, and though it is long since I was under her care, and she is gone now, like a child I still long for her made-from-scratch soup when I'm in need of nurturing.

My mother made amazing soups: Chicken soup flavored with carrot and bay leaf, and a steaming flotilla of light, fluffy dumplings. Slow-simmered white bean soup with ham bone. And a thick, warm, green split pea with carrot soup that could mend broken bones, dry tears, fill up all your lonely places.

That soup was full of mother love. And until the end of time, there will never be anyone else in the world who can make anything for me that contains that particular and precious ingredient.

So I've been ill. And as they can't help but do, sicknesses set one back. There was still digging and planting to be done. The little native grasses I’d brought home in September waited still in their cardboard trays on the back porch, catching day after day of westering sun, witness to the chickadees and cardinals on their daily visits to the feeder—all while managing to avoid the squirrels’ interest in uprooting plants altogether. Survivors, clearly.

In mid-October—perilously late in the northern year for planting—I entrusted them to the ground, like an incantation:

Sweet grass.

Switch grass.

Side oats grama.

I murmured to them as I freed them from their plastic containers, where their fine, pale roots had wrapped around and around in their search for the earth. They were, I thought, desperate to escape and expand into the soil of here. 

A place where they evolved perfectly to grow.

A place that evolved perfectly to grow them.

I sat in the dirt with trowel and bare hands, and dug a hole for each one—a waving, seedheaded, wind-sized hole, a singing sweetness-sized hole.

Be welcome, I told them. Take root. Do not regard passing feet or wheels. Hold fast through winter, as we all must do.

Rest. You are home now.

The sun was pale-fading by the time I finished, and so was I.

I scrubbed the good soil from my hands and ate soup that my mother did not make, casting my own blessings upon it.

And maybe dreamed that night of feathery white roots, questing for home.

Putting down roots

I hear leaves drinking rain;

I hear rich leaves on top

Giving the poor beneath

Drop after drop;

'Tis a sweet noise to hear

These green leaves drinking near.

—W.H. Davies, The Rain

So the rain falls and falls in this late Spring, feeding the amber waters of the rushing Minnehaha Creek, running high in its banks and carrying paddling ducks downstream on a much wilder ride than usual.

Between rain showers, I've cleared a bit more space on the south side of our house and tucked in clumps of native flowering plants dear to bees and butterflies: Hoary Vervain, Aromatic Aster, Yellow and Long-Headed Coneflowers, Butterfly Weed (for the monarch butterfly caterpillars, which feed only on milkweed), Prairie Phlox, Anise Hyssop, White and Purple Prairie Clover, Elm-Leaved Goldenrod, Virgin's Bower.

All perennials, so it will take a while for them to get established and begin to flower, especially with the cloudy, cool weather. I feel a bit like a just-planted bit of flora myself, feeling my way back into my native soil, spreading my root system, deciding which direction to grow.

Kew Gardens in May

Though it is nine days into June, the maple seeds still hang in clumps, helicoptering down and sprouting at will. The peony buds still swell slowly, ready to burst into bloom with a week of sun. The brief flowering of crabapples and lilacs petals all washed away in spills and squalls of raindrops.

Prairifire Crabapple we planted last spring

My young north boulevard tree, a Prairie Gem Pear that replaced an ailing Ash, just welcomed two vigorous  new Ussurian Pear cousins, courtesy of the City of Minneapolis Forestry Division. Despite its name, this species hails from Asia and is not native to Midwest prairies.

But it does flower in spring, and if can't be local, it is at least ornamental--and small enough to live under the power lines without getting butchered by the utility company.

To further dive more deeply into a Minnesota frame of mind, I just read Letters from Side Lake: A Chronicle of Life in the North Woods by Peter Leschak, who has lived for nearly 40 years in a log house he and his wife built on a parcel of land in Lake Country. (Which is what Minnesotans also call "Up North," to distinguish it from the rest of a very lakey state). 

If I had any romantic illusions about the idea of "living off the land," they have been dismantled. But there is a lot of territory between living off the land and living closer to the land, in search of older traditions made new, and that is the direction in which I am being pulled. Feel free to suggest any readings that may have inspired you on the subject, I am eager to soak up more.