I was today years old when I figured out that my grandparents had told me a story that is apparently not true. In my slow summery childhood, I traveled with them on many Fridays out of suburban Chicago, past industrial Gary, Indiana, and up to Michigan. Before the...
In the abundant summer, mature trees unveil themselves in all their power, ferociously alive, brilliantly vigorous and stretching up. Those that stand alone are particularly stunning, with their strong supports and barky architecture. There are groves sometimes, too,...
My bookshelves are crowded, and I sometimes think about off-loading, purging, thinking in passing “well, I’ll never read that again.” Then I wake up, slap myself briskly, and realize that in a sense my books are the architecture of the house my mind lives in. Each one...
It’s May, and this northern city is finally greening. The buildings, the built world, are the same, but the infrastructure of trees, dozing during the winter months, is rousing. Spring has moved northward on its own mysterious, rhythmic, and dependable calendar. It...
It’s almost axiomatic now to think unpleasantly about downtowns. They’re this, they’re that, they’re the other thing. Unappealing, worsening. Here’s a contrary view, from my desk in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota on a regular old Tuesday morning, a cold spring day....
This time of year, I can become a touch weary with the wearing o’ the green. The sweeping and wonderful Irish folkloric culture seems a bit, well, debased in March, with the fairy folk diminished to cartoonish leprechauns and powerful old tales reduced to green...
