7.3 miles
lake nokomis and back
40 degrees
Sun! Sun! Finally some sun! After days of gloom, sun and warmer air. Birds. Snow all gone. Greenish grass. It feels like spring. An unpopular opinion, but as much as I like this weather, I want some snow. Big fluffy flakes to run through. The silence only a blanket of snow can create. Crisp, cold air. I’m sure we’ll get some in February.
Ran to the lake for a specific reason: I wanted to see if Painted Turtle, the restaurant, has made any progress on building a structure so they can serve beer this summer. Nope — at least, now that I could see.
The lake still has a thick layer of ice, but the surface is wet and blue. Such a beautiful, intense blue. I don’t think I saw anyone out in the middle on the ice — did I just forgot to look? Or is too wet or too thin?
10 Things
- Ran over the recently redone duck bridge, noticed it squeaking
- a sparkling river
- a truck making a racket as it went over a bump — the noisiest part were its rattling chains
- no ice on the creek, no water in the swampy area in my favorite part of the path
- what I thought was a teacher’s shrill whistle at the playground was a bird, calling repeatedly
- still working on nokomis avenue, had to cross over to the sidewalk
- lots of mud near the lake — again, no snow
- walking by my favorite bench at the big beach, imagining myself sitting there this summer and my suit, waiting for open swim to begin
- no poem on the window at the house that used to put up a poem on their front window
- many friendly, kind people on the sidewalk moving over for me to pass
Earlier this morning, reading the Longfellow Messenger, I found an article about Edmund Avenue — the one I’ve mentioned many times here. The Edmund is after Edmund Walton who was the first developer to do a racial covenant on the properties he was selling. He did this in 1910. Some people want to change the name. I’m with them. Racial covenants are terrible; we had one on our house that we didn’t realize was there and just filed paperwork to get it removed a few weeks ago. And, it’s not in the past; our neighborhood, and all of Minneapolis, is still shaped by who could and couldn’t buy a home here. The article mentioned a site: Reclaiming Edmund
Found this poem last week:
an excerpt from Poem/ Shin Yu Pai
for Wolfgang Laib
a life
of collecting pollen
from hazelnut bushes
a life of gathering word-grains
to find all you have wanted
all you have waited to say
five
mountains
we cannot climb
hills we cannot touch
perhaps we are only here
to say house, bridge, or gate
a passage
to somewhere else
House, bridge, or gate. Love this idea. I want to add it to my thoughts on windows and doors.