Art

Last March, like this one, was placid and mild; it was a true and distinct season instead of the usual Northland spring, which is often held hostage in an icy chokehold by winter. No, the days slowly and confidently transformed from ash and smoke into gently unfurling golds and greens.

This seems like an odd observation for someone who spent most of it in a dim, whispered wing of St. Mary’s Hospital. My second born, my new baby daughter, made an alarmingly early entrance into the world, interrupting a Friday afternoon’s planned errands: Target for hand towels, aspirin, and an indulgent Starbucks latte, and maybe the children’s boutique, Sproutlings, to fawn over tiny, unpractical pastel things — booties and bows and expectations of the chubby baby thighs to come.

For two days in that early March week, something was off about my pregnancy and I was torn between taking my intuition seriously by calling to move up a scheduled prenatal appointment or discrediting the feeling as merely nerves. The former won the battle. I hadn’t felt much movement out of my usually active, somersaulting babe. After a nurse on the phone recommended I head into Labor and Delivery at the hospital for a non-stress test, my husband left work early to accompany me and our 3 year old. We’d just pop in — it was probably nothing — and then head off to do some quick shopping before the weekend. (more…)

I can’t remember ever knowing who I am or believing I belong.

Moving story, bro, but what’s your point? A lot of people occasionally wonder who they are. We all sometimes feel out of place.

Right. But I mean I have no idea who I am. I mean I have never (literally not ever) felt like I belong among other humans. Oh, and sometimes when I’m trying to figure out that stuff I feel like part of me was from Duluth — from this place — long before I started living here. That’s pretty weird.

I come from people who lived in Duluth for a while and loved it and contributed to it and died and are buried in dirt here. My maternal great-grandpa, George Beck, was Duluth Central principal for about 30 years, then helped found WDSE-TV. Mom grew up in McGregor and often came over on the train to visit him and great-grandma (Leila) Beck. Mom got a Duluth Business University degree and worked at the air base for a while. Dad graduated from UMD in 1970, the same year I was conceived at 927 West Fifth Street. Great-grandma died in ’81; Great-grandpa went in ’91; their bodies are at Forest Hill Cemetery. (more…)

In 2003, George W. Bush was running for re-election. (I don’t want to talk about whether or not this was a re-election campaign or an election campaign, after the Florida funny business. I’m just glad he’s not the president now.) The campaign was ugly. The issues were suddenly intensely divisive and personal — particularly where Roe v. Wade was concerned. You couldn’t turn the radio on without hearing ferocious, fervent diatribes surrounding the issue of legal abortion. I was accustomed to avoiding the conversation, and, hopefully, allowing each person to reconcile their own reproductive decisions between themselves and God or whomever they like to reconcile themselves to.

But it was all over the radio and television, in conversation overheard in bank teller lines and grocery stores, and, it turns out, on the playground. My son was only 9 years old. I’m not sure how the political pogwank wove itself into playground diatribe — perhaps between games of four-square and soggy rectangle pizza slices, the little ones polarized and debated the benefits and disadvantages of prison reform and estate tax in hissed, lispy whispers. Anyway. I think it was sometime around October? The campaign rhetoric was bitter, loud, and everywhere. I fielded ten kabillion questions from my son about everything from homosexuality to terrorism, providing spanky PBS answers, neatly avoiding genitals, hate, and murder. Then, one day, as I drove us to the grocery store, my son piped up, “Mom, what’s an abortion?” (more…)

I left a good life in the City.

My husband and I had established careers and moved our young family out of our Minneapolis duplex and into our forever house in a first-ring suburb. An Atomic rambler with thick plaster walls, on a corner lot in an award-winning school district, it was lovely. Add in large, southern-exposed windows, a fireplace and a finished basement large enough to raise Shetland ponies, well, it was the “Beige Rambler of my Dreams.” Jason and I planned to watch our children grow up in their award-winning school district, as we grew old in the safety of one-floor living.

And though my husband had truly wanted this house and all its middle-class trappings, our suburban lifestyle had Jason on the verge of a boredom aneurysm.

That’s when a Duluth headhunter found him; a vulnerable adult constricted by a place where lawn maintenance was competitive sport. Given we lived on the boulevard (a term invoked with a disturbing reverence) there was pressure to perform to Olympic levels with chemical sprays, lawn services and street-long coordinated Christmas light displays. In contrast, curb appeal in the Northland is scarcely an intramural. (more…)