Pictured here the immigrant Anderson Family: Bottom row – Lars, Mabel, and Lisa; Top row –  Mathew, Levi, and Alma The Mystery Even as children, my siblings and I knew we were mostly Norwegian. (We must have known we were legally Americans, but we never called ourselves that.) Our mother’s father (morfar in Norwegian) came […]

How does a city watershed flow?
September 14, 2020

This piece describes the watershed of my city home, was written for Transition Town – All Saint Anthony Park, and was published in the Park Bugle in March of 2020. Half to three-quarters of your body is water. Of the earth’s surface, about 70% is water. Where did the water in you come from? When […]

For the Sea, All Watersheds’ End
January 12, 2021

In spring of 2018, I took a forty-day trip, traveling mostly by train, getting off to write and to visit my grown children. For two weeks I stayed among cypress trees in Northern California and walked each day to a shed where I wrote as quail bobbed by. There I was able to write the […]

Blog
Letting Go of 161
August 4, 2022

[This is a piece I wrote years ago that will not let go of me. I post it now in honor of my colleagues in Community Colleges who still welcome and love 161 or more students each term.] Letting Go of 161 I have just posted grades. The last of the 161. August 24th we […]

Strawberry Birthmark
February 10, 2021

“Did your dad tell you about the strawberry birthmark?” my aunt asked. I was driving north with her on 35 in the summer of 1989, an occasional moth splattering plumply against the windshield. “What’s a strawberry birthmark?” I asked, glancing quizzically at Aunt Dorothy in the passenger seat. Her silver hair fanned out along the […]

Moving Toward Justice
Inside that poisoned strawberry
March 28, 2021

The story of the strawberry birthmark – and behind that the story of the poisoned berry – intrigued me when Aunt Dorothy told it and has fascinated people I’ve told it to since. But is there more? Is there something darker, something needing to reach awareness, something striving toward justice? I posted the story on […]

Dreaming toward the 49th Generation
February 15, 2021

“If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” -Percy Bysshe Shelley In the winters of my fortunate childhood, snow gleamed under bright sun. After stormy days, it blanketed the woods and splattered in clumps from fir tree boughs. On the snow surface, tracks marked out paths—generations of voles and moles and mice rising up in […]

Offer of Food to the Wild Ones
August 16, 2021

I asked a class of Minneapolis College students to find and watch a wild animal (or at least to remember watching one who was wild) and then to write about that being. Many returned with writings about squirrels – not red squirrels, not ground squirrels, not flying squirrels. No. Grey squirrels. City squirrels. I hope […]

Moving Toward Justice

Racial justice is essential to climate justice. Ecological activists wonder sometimes why we don’t revolt more strongly against impending climate disaster. It may be that our privilege as white people enables us to feel distant from the climate trauma already devastating many people of color, locally and globally. To look at the privileges that distance […]