The reason we moved back to the US is beginning to unfold, as spring takes hold, and the boys behold the burgeoning beauty of a land accustomed to a deep freeze, speckled with bodies of water long fat skinny round and winding. lakes and trees and sunshine. Minnesota when the sun comes out is a place I want to swallow like a delicious lozenge of light that not only tastes great, but grants me the ability to fly too.
Art everywhere we go. Expression combined with nature to create balance, the real reason any of us are here really. To align ourselves with the world around us, express what we feel, and through that harmony approach truth. If vines could grow alongside hair from our heads and ears then we would be walking masterpieces of the creator and his angel cohorts. A berry for a nose. I pause everywhere to peep a tag enter a museum watch paint dry and see crows lift off with grace. it’s a strange and beautiful place to be, magical land where cars and apartment blocks and job applications roam unawares.
These boys are just now embarking on one of those Great Summers. Remember those? I do. The days of high adventure. The days that lasted forever. The nights hot and dripping. Everything so far away, so removed, just the leaves rustling in the wind and sunlight to drink nonchalantly during a slight pause in the running. Bugs and sticks and water and mud and burns that turn brown overnight. Sleepovers.
It’s in the water and Minnesota is a water tribe state. Forests and lakes and rivers and vast skies with puffy clouds and thunderstorms like the end of the world. We watch the sun set over Lake Calhoun, or Lake of the Isles, or from Lowry Hill, wherever we happen to be when the sky starts morphing and exploding into wave after wave of crimson orange purple and blue. The planes escape the tarmac in time to roar through the painted sky, just ahead of the brush. Lights from man accentuate the last glow of the sun.
This is why I came here. So boys could be boys. Chase squirrels and bait hooks, grab sticks as they walk and wack a tree. Dip their feet in, get tan, go commando, run and run and run through the woods and the sunshine and burst through the brush to go flying into the mirror for the sun. Art, art and more art. Wonder daily and pack each segment of time with as much changing color and flashes as sanity allows.
