Yesterday it snowed about an inch or two where we are. The day before we had the year's first sighting of Canada geese returning. That's a pattern we've experienced in years past but it's a couple of weeks or so early for the geese. The snow will be gone tomorrow. The geese will hang around for months, starting and raising a family. The ice is letting go it's Winter grip on the St. Croix and its feeders. Minnesota keeps practicing Spring but all too rarely gets it right as a steady progression toward Summer. It's usually a herky, jerky, spastic lurching forward and back, as if Minnesota Spring were a drunk stumbling toward a season of drying out.
cairn beside a northern Minnesota road
Photo by J. Harrington
There's been a lot of shouting this political season about the growing (grown) inequity in our country (and, though not mentioned as much, in the world). I recently came across a thought-provoking essay about some of the implications of economic deprivation. Pleasetakemake some time this weekend to read and think about the essay On Poverty by Alison Stine. It reminds me of a lot of the social, economic and educational issues Minnesota's Iron Range has to keep confronting. No doubt such issues are particular constraints, along with numerous others, for many of our Native American communities, and those who choose to live outside urban areas.
Capital seems to forget its reliance on labor. No industrialist built, by him or herself, roads on which a business depends to get employees and materials in and finished products to market. [Check Scott Russell Sanders essays "Getting There and "Cutting Road" in Wilderness Plots to understand what I'm talking about.] Levitt towns and company towns should become historical relics. Too many of us seem to forget our reliance on a functioning environment. We're no longer trying to "settle" this country. Those days are gone. We have truly "gone forth and multiplied and subdued the earth." Now it's time to help her recover. Paul Wellstone had it right. "We all do better when we all do better." That "all" has to include the only home we've got as well as our other current and future neighbors, distant and near. We all depend on each other.
Empty Pitchforks
“There was poverty before money.”
There was debtors’ prison before inmates,there was hunger prefossil,
there was pain before a nervous systemto convey it to the brain, there existed
poverty before intelligence, or accountants,before narration; there was bankruptcy aswirl
in nowhere, it was palpablewhere nothing was palpable, there was repossession
in the gasses forming so many billion ... ;there was poverty—it had a tongue—in cooling
ash, in marl, and coming loam,thirst in the few strands of hay slipping
between a pitchfork’s wide tines,in the reptile and the first birds,
poverty aloof and no mystery like Godits maker; there was surely want
in one steamed and sagging onion,there was poverty in the shard of bread
sopped in the final drop of gravyyou snatched from your brother’s mouth.
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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.
OK, I've seen a V going north, so it's time for one of my favorite favorite quotes from--
ReplyDelete"March, the Geese Return," in the book: A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
"One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw is the spring. A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken, can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence. A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed. But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges."