4.45 miles
minnehaha falls
33 degrees
60% sloppy and wet
A run outside! Above freezing! Less layers! And I made it all the way to the falls! It was sloppy, but I’ve run through worse. No lakes covering the entire path, only small ponds. I felt stronger running up all the small hills; it must be the hill workouts I’ve started doing. Maybe I should run to the falls and do some loops around the park — I could do the hills there multiple times? It’s strange, but I like running up hills now.
10 Things
- birds singing and sounding more like spring
- the dull, quiet whine of a power tool off in the distance — a drill on a construction site?
- the falls are completely frozen, so is the creek
- voices rising up from somewhere down below at the base of the falls
- faint traces of brown dirt discoloring the snow, making it less winter wonderland, but also less slick
- kids yelling and laughing on a playground — a teacher’s whistle blowing (not a warning about ICE)
- empty benches everywhere
- a few cars in the park parking lot
- another runner behind me, beside me, then in front of me. I delighted in hearing the sibilant sounds of their feet striking the slushy snow
- a few seconds of honking above on the ford bridge — someone honking at ICE or another car’s driving or in solidarity with a bridge brigade?
Get Out Ice
Today’s Get Out Ice moment is in honor of my mom, who was a fiber artist until she died in 2009, and my daughter, who is a fiber artist now.
AS OF FEBRUARY 5TH.
Needle & Skein Instagram post
WE HAVE REACHED A TOTAL OF
$650,000 IN DONATIONS
Funds last week were donated to STEP St. Louis Park emergency assistance for rent and other aid and the Immigrant Rapid Response Fund.
We are working on donations to other local organizations
– stayed tuned for more info.
We are speechless. We are overwhelmed with the generosity of the fiber community and beyond. This outpouring of love and support is felt around the state.
Because of you, we can help so many people who need it.
Thank you thank you thank you.
Keep knitting. Keep resisting. Keep showing up for your neighbors.
Melt. The. Ice.
The $650,000 came from people purchasing a $5 pattern for the Melt the Ice Hat:
In the nine years that Gilah Mashaal has owned Needle & Skein, a yarn store in the suburbs of Minneapolis, she has tried to maintain a rule that “nobody talks politics” in the shop. But amid the weeks-long occupation of the Twin Cities by federal immigration paramilitaries, Mashaal and one of her employees decided to turn one of their weekly knit-alongs into a “protest stitch-along”.
They didn’t want to return to the “pussy hats” that symbolized women’s resistance to Donald Trump in 2016, so Paul, their employee, did some research and came back with a proposal: a red knit hat inspired by the topplue or nisselue (woolen caps), worn by Norwegians during the second world war to signify their resistance to the Nazi occupation.
‘Rage Knitting’ against the machine
Love #13, version 2
This morning, I was trying out all different ways to create a poem out of text from a few local businesses. Nothing was quite working; partly because I am fixated on erasures and blackouts and can’t see (literally and figuratively) how to execute this effectively. One way out: Mary Oliver. My whole poem centers on a phrase from a MO poem, “Lead”:
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never
close again
to the rest of the world.
Here’s my version of those lines, using words from Social media posts:
Here, now,
on this day,
my heart
breaks,
and tomorrow
it will stay open
to everything.
Or this variation:
My heart breaks
here, now,
and tomorrow,
it will stay open
to everything.