Nostalgia

Memories are returning. I don't generally spend a  lot of time dipping into the past. Thinking about Minnesota before this trip up was mostly a rehash of work, especially since I frequently wake from dreams where I'm struggling to find places to park, never having the correct paperwork, blanking out on where certain buildings are, nevermind what they're named. The "what" tower on 9th and 2nd in Minneapolis ...? It's probably been bought and renamed anyway, so why bother?

With the stress of waiting through much of the summer for Steve's accumulating aggravations in (not) getting his back procedure, and finally finding out we would have to leave immediately for a short visit, or miss summer north altogether, my emotional map was dealing with scheduling family and friend visits, and not the locations where I spent over 60 years of my life. Arizona has become home, and very comfortably so. 

Now that I've been doing some driving around while visiting friends and family, old memories are shaking loose from the dusty brain closet. Last weekend we headed north along  I-35 far enough for the landscape to change into all that accompanies entering a landscape underlain by sandy soils. to pull out the familiarity of where I grew up, leaving the density of foliage which - since Arizona - had felt stifling, replacing it with aspens, bogs with long-dead spurs jutting up where trees once dwelled, more open ground between trees instead of solid walls of green enclosing the roads.

Some of that nostalgia is from the change in fauna. About the only piece of Minnesota which also appears in Arizona is the sporadic flock of Canada geese snacking on the grass of a local golf course, then honking as they pass overhead to find a (created) lake for the evening. Oddly enough, I've yet to see a goose up here. I'm also missing herons (great blue) and egrets. It occurs to me to wonder whether they returned north before the last of the nasty weather retreated and were caught by the resultant lack of food. Many of the spots I've driven by were reliable locations for sighting them in years past. I hope I'm wrong. But this changing climate is fickle.

It's not just megafauna. Besides a female ruby throated hummingbird and a variety of bees, butterflies visit tall cup flowers outside the dining and kitchen windows: tiger swallowtails, monarchs, others I cannot recall the names for. Paul even picked up a luna moth caterpillar from the driveway and relocated it in the nearby foliage, something I rarely see since leaving the resort as a child. There we kept large yard lights on all night, and frequently had the opportunity to pluck one, or a cecropia moth, off the pole when one perched low enough for us to reach while it waited out the daylight hours.

It's not just the driving around that's dredging up memories. My sister-in-law send me a link to an article about taking in the attractions along the back roads. This was my response, referring back to our early childhood living on a resort on 2nd Crow Wing lake:

"Gee, feels just like home! I have great memories (Steve should too) of Daddy taking us out for Sunday drives, taking different roads "just because" - though I think a big part of his motive was searching out good spots to hunt partridge, pheasants and deer. as well as finding likely cranberry bogs, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, chokecherries, hazelnuts, pine cones for crafts, an active eagle nest in the heyday of DDT ….

"Maybe more of it was pure entertainment, with no TV back then, working hard in the struggle to make the resort pay off when a second job was always needed. "Just" driving around was a relief from all that.

"We didn't do so much of finding the local tourist attractions - or maybe I just didn't register if we did. After all, I can visualize giant fish statues and Paul Bunyan with Babe.

"As well, there was always Gunsmoke on the radio, often followed by Point of Law. We had to be quiet to listen. And if we kids were still bored, there was always doing addition in our heads, way ahead of where we were in school. Steve was the one who helped me to the shortcut of adding three-column figures, introducing the concept of carrying the tens to the next column. "

Now, with something more than all the planning, organizing and implementing, this has become my vacation.