minneapolis and other recent happys

Today is the sort of day worth mentioning because it's a fine day. Just ... nice. I woke up early and felt rested, I went running, I made some eggs, I conferenced with a handful of students and had a few lightbulb moments, I caught up on a backlog of work and made a bunch of handouts. There were some nice surprises in there, too; desk copies of some fine-looking poetry books arrived, kind editors picked up new work, the web site is nearly complete. It was a gray rainy day, perfect for holing up in the office with Bon Iver; there were quesadillas to be had for dinner; now, there's free time to sprawl out with a Truman tucked up against my legs and listen to new music.

After classes tomorrow, our spring break officially begins. We're already on the other side of midterms, and in a month and a half, we'll be finished with the semester--even before, perhaps, the crocuses raise their heads. I might just break out a skirt by the last day of classes. Spring break won't find me wearing one, unless I want to run around Wisconsin with frostbitten ankles, but I've lived in the north for eighteen years now, so the idea that some very sarcastic air quotes belong around the spring part of spring break is nothing new.

These pleasant little days don't usually find me in the thick middle of winter, but something's different this time around. I'm sure that some of it has to do with the running, and I'm sure that some of it has to do with recent Chicago goodness. I'm sure, too, that much of it is thanks to the past weekend's trip to Minnesota. Originally I hadn't planned on making it out to BockFest, but in late January I changed my mind, so last Friday found the AV and I at Humphrey Terminal by ten o'clock. And then we were off with the Liz, first to the co-op to admire root vegetables and then driving down to Elgin on a cold, clear, sunny day.



I thought a lot about Minnesota this weekend, as we drove from the Cities to Elgin and over to Kato. I thought about the weekend trips I made to the Cities last year from our apartment in Madison, and how those trips were one of the few bright spots in that long winter. I marveled at how foreign the landscape felt. When I first moved to Minnesota, I had panic attacks; the farmland stretched on for miles, and the sky seemed so tall. You could see storms and green skies rolling in from miles away in the summer, and in the winters, the sky was a blue I'd never before seen. It took me months to get used to that horizon.

By the time I left Wisconsin this past August, I was acclimated to that Midwest sky, but a few months in Michigan have wiped that clean from me. This weekend, the sky nearly took my breath away. We'd be rumbling down Highway 14 and I'd be looking out the window, marveling at the flat, bright farms. And I thought about how much has changed in those five years since I first packed the car and headed out to Kato.



But the people I met out there haven't changed, and the weekend with them was just what I needed. This February has been filled with travel, and it's wonderful; although my destinations haven't been balmy, they've been restorative. The whole weekend was nanerpusses and bock and pinot noir and dancing and talking teaching and Neil Diamond, and it fully recharged my battery. It was just what I needed, even if perhaps it was not the most scenic month in which to visit Minnesota.



Like I said, I can't remember a winter that felt this good--of course, I'm still throwing things at the television when they forecast yet another storm, and the skies here are still gray, and it would be nice to be sitting out on the back deck with this laptop and a sweating beer. But something still feels different this winter--a good different.

A former student of mine from Minnesota is applying to graduate schools right now, and because of that I'm reliving a little bit what it felt like to be finishing up in undergrad, to (in my case) not make the first round of acceptances, to realize on a warm April night two weeks before graduation that I was going to need a plan B. That was a strange time, the first in my life I felt the world outside of academia pressing upon me.

No matter what the next year brought--and it brought some other strange times, like a full-time gig waiting tables, and the experience of how to teach a small puppy how to not chew all the crotches out of my clean underwear, and how to break up with somebody that I still lived with, and then, finally, letters from Utah and Florida and Minnesota that said, Yes, you can come here--I do remember thinking that I wanted only to go see where this writing thing would take me. I knew even then that I was in for a little bit of an uphill climb, that I would never make more of an annual salary than most decent bartenders. And definitely not more than the good-looking ones.

But if I had given up after that first round, I wouldn't have moved to Minnesota and met the B. I wouldn't have met people who kick as much ass at Trivial Pursuit as I do. I wouldn't have spent this past weekend rolling over the icy roads back to Kato in the backseat of an Intrepid and eating refried beans and wrapping myself in painter's tape, or photographing orchids in the warm humid of the conservatory, or nearly choking with laughter at Ecopolitan. There wouldn't have been Schell's while standing around in the snow, and I wouldn't have had a stack of papers to grade on the short flights back here, and I certainly wouldn't have had the luxury of this beautiful little Wednesday, holed up in my office with lessons, feeling as if what I I'm doing is something worth a damn.

And that's what I want to tell him--that no matter what comes from this year of his, or what his folks may say to their son, the poet--that spending days busy with what he loves, what he really fucking loves, is one of the most incredible feelings there is. It will make it all worthwhile. It will carry him over the bumps in the road. And I hope for him what I hope for everyone out there tonight: that one day you have a winter day as nice as this one.