Slingshot Annie

“I see no more dangerous development than the build-up of central cities surrounded by white suburbs.”

Today, all of Minnesota looked evil straight in the eyes as we learned the truth about Jacob Wetterling.

It’s a truth that feels inevitable and yet so shocking; we didn’t expect the details to be so vivid and graphic, and we certainly didn’t expect that it would take 27 years to get to this place, a place where we’d be reading about the fate of this poor missing boy on Twitter, and seeing his last words and final fearful moments spelled out in cold, unpunctuated bursts, his long saga rendered into a hashtag.

I held onto my computer and sobbed. I had no choice but to flash back to being a child myself, growing up in the ‘80s, feeling the fear of unspeakable horror seep into my consciousness for the first time.

I grew up in small town Minnesota, just like Jacob. I rode a bike down a dirt road with my friends, peddling from one farm to another, looking up over rows of corn at the big dark sky full of stars. I remember watching for Halley’s Comet out there on that gravel road in front of my friend’s farm; picking wildflowers and putting them in our hair; building a fort in the woods where we could escape from all her brothers.

One night, we decided we were going to try to sleep out in our fort, and we were so excited. We had been reading The Boxcar Children and Little House on the Prairie, and we imagined our little ramshackle sanctuary to be a cross between a secret hideout and a prairie cabin; we planned to tie brush together to make a broom, pile quilts to make a bed on the floor, tell stories by candlelight.

But something changed as night fell. As we made our way to the fort we’d been so many times during the daylight hours, a newfound sense of fear set in. I became irreversibly nervous. I could feel my gut hardening and my pulse racing. Being out there by ourselves in all that pitch-black darkness wasn’t fun, it was scary. And it wasn’t just the idea of bears or raccoons or wolves invading our sanctuary that made the panic set in; it’s that we were just far enough away from my friend’s house that someone could come and take us and no one would ever know what happened.

It’s a strange and ambiguous fear, to dread being taken.

Around the time that Jacob Wetterling’s “MISSING” poster was hung up in our town’s post office, they started teaching us about how to avoid it.

If a stranger pulls up in a car and offers you candy, don’t take it. If he says that he knows your parents and that your mom asked him to pick you up, don’t believe it. No matter what he says, do not get in that car. If you fuck this up, it’s all over: You’ll be taken. And we might never see you again.

When I was really little, I accidentally started following a woman around the grocery store who was wearing the same coat and had the same haircut as my mom. When she turned around, I started crying because it wasn’t my mom, and I didn’t know where she was. It turned out fine, but in that moment I was sure I had almost been taken.

Another time when I was about 8, we ran into a classmate of mine at a department store in Duluth who had gotten separated from his mom; he had ducked under a rack of clothes to play hide-and-seek, and when he came back out she was gone. As we were standing with him, his mom ran up and grabbed him by the shoulders. “DON’T EVER DO THAT AGAIN!!!” she shrieked, crying and shaking him. Didn’t he realize how close he had gotten to disappearing forever?

In the 1980s, stories of missing and dead kids were everywhere. They made us watch Adam in school, and I remember staring at the cover for Without a Trace in the video store. I don’t know what good it did having these stories stay at the very front of our minds. The more they tried to protect us, the more it chewed away at our naivety and cast a pall over our supposedly carefree childhoods.

The older I got, the more obsessed I became with this idea of being taken. My parents put a reflective decal on my bedroom window to help firefighters locate me in the event that our house caught fire, and I didn’t know what I was more afraid of: the idea of our house going down in flames, or the fact that this sticker would help scary men to find me and grab me in the night. I would stare at that sticker and worry about being taken by robbers, by bears (?), even by the police. Sometimes I would get so freaked out that I couldn’t even raise my voice to call out to my mom; I would creep across the dining room floor on my hands and knees, crawling beneath the picture window so the scary men outside couldn’t see me, and stand at my parents’ bedroom door whispering for their help. Nothing felt safe, not even in my own house with the light on in the hallway and my parents snoring 20 feet away.

There’s a reason why Stranger Things resonates so soundly with my generation, and it isn’t the soundtrack. It’s that it pushes us through the motions of this story we all know so well: You could be biking with your friends, and then you could be gone. Everyone will look for you, but you will be nowhere to be found. And yet somehow, the Stranger Things monsters living in parallel universes waiting to snatch kids through a tear in the time-space continuum seem way less scary than the grim realities that we are confronted with here on earth.

When I was expressing my devastation about the Jacob Wetterling story today, someone on Twitter replied to remind me that “child abductions are *extremely* rare.” While I appreciate the sentiment (and trying to stay rational on such an emotionally trying day), the fact is that it has never felt rare to me, or to most of us who have lived through this story as it unfolded over an impossible number of years in Minnesota.

The Wetterlings have long stood as a symbol for hope in the darkness; they taught us that even when things look impossibly bleak, there is still a chance that something good might come out of this, that there is light to be found. I think it’s a big reason why, when a 19-year-old girl named Katie Poirier was abducted from a gas station in my hometown, people from around the entire state came to Moose Lake to help look for her. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we held out hope that Katie was alive until her killer finally admitted that she was not. We hoped, hoped, hoped that her story, yet another abduction story, would resolve into something besides yet another an impossible-to-stomach conclusion.

“For us, Jacob was alive until we found him,” Patty Wetterling said today. My heart breaks again for them, knowing that they can finally lay Jacob to rest, that he never did get to grow beyond 11 years old, and that the hope they’ve carried for almost three decades has gone out. This heartbreaking story, which we’ve spent all these years relentlessly trying to spin into a message of positivity, can be realized for what it truly is: a horrifying, devastating tragedy suffered by a brave family who never stopped shining their light in the face of all that unknowable evil.

“The only way you’re going to wake people up is by inconveniencing them”

On Saturday evening, July 9, protesters overtook a section of I-94 in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul, stopping traffic for several hours. Yesterday morning, 41 allies of the Black Lives Matter movement joined hands across 35W, grinding traffic to a halt during the morning rush hour. We know these aren’t the first instances of protest interrupting highway traffic. Last fall, in the wake of the police killing of Jamar Clark, Black Lives Matter led demonstrations onto the same stretch of I-94 in Rondo and onto the segment of I-94 that cuts through North Minneapolis; for those aware of the history of the highway system in Minnesota, it was made all the more profound that they were marching through the two main historically African-American neighborhoods in the Twin Cities that were gutted by 94 construction.

(A residential section of Rondo near Dale Street that was cleared to make way for I-94; photo courtesy MNHS)

What surprised me, though, is that the history of highway protests in the Twin Cities goes back much farther than our memories may recall. In fact, disrupting highway traffic is a tactic that has been used by protesters for almost as long as the highway has existed.

The section of I-94 that bridges Minneapolis and St. Paul was opened in 1968. Just four years later, hundreds of students from the University of Minnesota walked onto the lanes of traffic in protest of the escalating Vietnam War on May 11, 1972.

This particular protest was part of a week-long series of demonstrations, marches, speeches, and concerts. The Minnesota Daily did a deep-dive on this history back in 1997.

The “Eight Days in May,” as the period of unrest from May 9-16, 1972 came to be called, witnessed the largest, most violent University demonstrations of the Vietnam War era. Beginning with a May 9 protest against the opening of a Cedar-Riverside housing development, now Riverside Plaza, protests spread to the East Bank, where confrontations between protesters and police on May 10 resulted in numerous injuries and arrests.

Minnesota National Guard units were called in that evening to monitor disturbances as demonstrators erected a barricade blocking traffic at the intersection of Washington Avenue and Church Street S.E. Both the barricade and the Guard were gone by May 13; meanwhile, bomb and fire scares sustained campus tensions, and protesters blocked traffic on Highway I-94.

The I-94 march came after a particularly tense and violent day of protest, which resulted in the National Guard being called and police spraying the protesters with mace from the ground and from a helicopter overhead.

More on the specific action on the highway, from the Minneapolis Tribune:

There was also ice cream to be had down on the interstate, thanks to a local businessman who seized the opportunity to turn a profit.

Two days after the highway protest, the Minneapolis Star asked participants to comment on why they felt their tactic was effective, despite widespread irritation and dismissal from the general population.

I spent some time this morning at the Minneapolis Central Library looking at the Star Tribune reports of the 1967 violence in Near North Minneapolis on microfilm. I suppose I’m trying to make sense of what’s going on by learning more about where we came from. As I mentioned in my previous posts, the National Guard was called in to Near North Minneapolis on July 22, 1967, to help “keep order,” which was announced that morning on the front page of the paper:

But wait. Check out the photo that was chosen for the front page. I know it’s grainy. Let’s start with the caption. “TEEN-AGERS GATHERED IN FRONT OF THE WAY COMMUNITY CENTER FOR A STREET DANCE. The dance, chaperoned by parents of neighborhood youths and Way officials, was described as ‘jovial.’” How nice, I thought. The Way community center was a cornerstone of the community and an essential safe space in the heart of the Near North neighborhood, built in the wake of an especially restless night of vandalism and looting along Plymouth Avenue in August 1966. It was a place where bored and aimless kids could hang out after school, shoot hoops, jam on musical instruments, and play ping-pong (a hobby that would stick with some of them for a lifetime; where do you think Prince picked up his mad skills?), and where older kids and young adults could get help finding work. 

How nice, I thought, that the Way stepped up once again to provide something positive for the young people in Near North using the healing power of music, and that they worked with parents to create a refuge amid the chaos. But wait. What are they looking at in the picture? That backdrop doesn’t look like the Way. Is that... a tank? I tried to adjust the lens on the microfilm machine to get a better view. There it was: a tank, men dressed in helmets and camouflage, and teenagers laughing and trying their best to dance as a battalion steamrolled its way down Plymouth Avenue looking like it was headed off to war.

When I got back from the library, I started searching for more context. The only place that an image of this event exists in digital form is on the St. Louis Park historical society’s website, presumably because the Jewish population that dominated Near North Minneapolis in the 1960s made a quick exit to the nearest suburb as soon as several popular Jewish-owned storefronts along Plymouth went up in flames.  Teen-agers gathered for a street dance. The dance was described as “jovial.”

Five decades later, youth from the North Minneapolis community would congregate on the streets of Plymouth Avenue and Morgan once again, searching for answers amid confusion and chaos. When the Way’s building was torn down, it was replaced by the Fourth Precinct police station. In November 2015, Black Lives Matter protested in front of the precinct for 18 days in response to the police killing of an unarmed 24-year-old black man, Jamar Clark, who was shot just four blocks away from the precinct near the intersection of Plymouth and James.

Long. Hot. Summer.

In the days following the tragic killing of Philando Castile by a St. Anthony police officer, protests and demonstrations have taken place all across Minneapolis and St. Paul, most notably closing down I-94 for several hours on Saturday night and leading to the aggressive arrest of over 100 citizens.

As a researcher who has spent the past two years learning about the history of discrimination, segregation, disparities, and racial strife in Minnesota (all of which are major undercurrents in a book I’m writing about Twin Cities funk and soul music), it’s been incredibly eye-opening to note how many parallels exist between the Twin Cities of the 1960s and the Twin Cities of today.

I am embarrassed at how little I knew about the unrest that swept through North Minneapolis and the Selby-Dale area of St. Paul in the late ‘60s, and perplexed at how difficult it’s been to find objectively written narratives of this portion of our state’s history. The fact that it’s not a readily available narrative makes it even easier to sweep these events into the dustbin of the past and keep ourselves at an arm’s length from our own history. But racism isn’t a thing that only happened in the 1960s, and the arduous fight for racial justice didn’t end with what we refer to as the civil rights movement. In reality, the civil rights movement isn’t over; it’s still unfolding all around us, and marching steadfastly onward whether we acknowledge its validity or not.

All of which brings me to a phrase that I’ve seen invoked many times this week.

“If we fail to act, this will be a long hot summer,” Congressional Black Caucus Chairman G.K. Butterfield said on Friday, urging lawmakers to pass sweeping policing and criminal justice reforms.

It was a sentiment echoed here in St. Paul by former NAACP president Nathaniel Khaliq, who was one of several community leaders who spoke passionately about justice for Philando Castile outside the Governor’s Mansion this week. “This time it’s going to be a long, long, hot summer,” he said.

And it’s been repeated time and again by the media this week. Even a relatively specific Google search for news articles containing both “Philando Castile” and “long hot summer” turns up 1,440 results.

So what does it mean? To start with, it’s a phrase with a 50-plus-year history.

Perhaps because there was a movie by the same name released in 1958 and so it was embedded in the media’s subconscious, the phrase “Long, hot summer” became a buzzword following the Watts riot in Los Angeles in 1965 and was invoked again in the summers of 1966 and 1967 to describe the unrest that was sweeping the nation.

According to Malcolm McLaughlin in Urban Rebellion in America: The Long, Hot Summer of 1967, newspapers had already starting predicting “a long, hot summer” in 1964, “even before the first Molotov cocktail was hurled, the first head was cracked, or the first store window was shattered.” From McLaughlin: “The phrase had long been used in a more literal sense, to describe the sticky summer months, but it gained renewed and widespread cultural relevance in 1958 when it was chosen as the title of a film, based on stories by William Faulker. While that movie was not about the Civil Rights movement, its sultry southern setting, its underlying tensions, and a threatened lyching (albeit of a white man, Ben Quick, played by Paul Newman) captured the world in which those conflicts were playing out. But, it was in the 1960s when ‘long, hot summer’ emerged as an evocative way to refer explicitly to the southern Civil Rights movement, where the heat of the sun combined with the heat of social conflict. When Martin Luther King, Jr., began his campaign in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964, he called a press conference to announce the start of ‘a long, hot, nonviolent summer’ of protest.” As black Americans became increasingly frustrated by the lack of employment opportunities, housing, and services — and as white citizens fled into the suburbs and accelerated the ghettoization of low-income neighborhoods in the urban core — the phrase morphed into a catch-all buzzword, alongside the word “riot,” to describe the African-American uprising of the mid- to late-’60s. The nonviolent actions of protesters and marchers were lumped together with the more destructive actions of frustrated youth — not all of whom were even members of the African-American community — to create a terror-inducing pastiche of urban chaos. "Long, hot, and summer” are just three little words, but when used collectively, their imprint on white America’s perception of black protest and black anger is profound. It could help to explain why, in August of 1966, when a couple dozen black teenagers in Near North Minneapolis vented their boredom and frustration by throwing bricks through Jewish shopkeepers’ windows, the mayor urged the police to stand down and back off, and the city responded by immediately holding public meetings, working with business leaders to create jobs, and supporting the creation of community centers like the Way; but why, when similar events began to unfold the very next summer, the Mayor was pressured to call in the National Guard and police were given the order to shoot to kill.

I've never been good at sitting still. When I'm forced to sit down for a movie or a concert or a haircut I've figured out how to minimize my movements and keep them discrete but never how to stop moving altogether; most of the fidgeting ends up concentrated in my hands, with all ten digest squirming and inspecting each other for the tiniest jagged edge or hangnail or other imperfection. 

I've never understood how people like my mother can maintain such flawless, long nails, or how she gets through an entire day with a snag in her nail and then casually files it back to perfection at night while watching TV. When I look back at old photographs of myself over the years the one thing that's remained constant is that my hands are always clenched, always searching and picking, always cusped with thumb around fingers like a G.I. Joe doll ready to pick up his baton, and when I look down at my hands there are always at least a few nails that have been bitten down to the quick and cuticles torn raw.

It occurred to me the other night, as I tried to sit still at yet another concert and ran my fingers through their normal obstacle course, that there are few times that I feel calmer than when I find something else to do with my hands. Playing piano, typing out words on my computer, even chopping onions or putting on a new record—these are all things that help subside the constant stirring and churning that's always happening inside me. When I lay down to sleep at night my mind flips through all the tasks and worries of the day like a rolodex and my swollen fingers go round and round, but when I finally get up the gumption to do something productive I always end up feeling so much better.

This past weekend I spent almost two full days busying my hands with all these other tasks—first by making cheese spreads and tiny cream cheese-stuffed penguins and cookies and other snacks for a party, then by greeting guests with hugs and taking coats and pouring drinks and gently resting hands on arms and backs to connect over the loud noise of the gathering. What a relief it was to finally find another use for my worried hands, to turn them into a tool for sharing food and love, and eventually, as the effects of the alcohol set in, to set them atop my piano keys and serenade all the happy people all around me as they swayed side to side.

I've been thinking a lot this winter about the Danish concept of hygge, and how we all find our own coping mechanisms and plan our own exit strategies as we endure yet another long and dark Minnesota winter. The Danes figure that the best way to get through the dark is to gather food and friends around warmth and light, and at first I wrote off the whole idea as an indulgent distraction—is getting drunk and eating too much really going to solve the problem? And how are we supposed to keep that up night after night?

But after this weekend, I realized that there is another underlying theme to hygge and friendship and music that soothes me at an almost subconscious level. I don't know how to cure my depression but at least I've figured out how to make it subside for a while—and it has a lot to do with using my hands to intentionally create joy. 

Northeast Minneapolis institution Nye's is closing next year. I dug around a bit and found these archival photos in the Hennepin County Library's Special Collections and the MN Historical Society. Photos #1 and #2 are from March 1967 (courtesy HCLIB), roughly 17 years after it opened and just three years after the bar expanded to include the Polonaise Room. Photo #3 is from 1970, #4 is from 1949, and #5 is from 1912 (all courtesy MNHS). Both #4 and #5 show East Hennepin from Main Street, and I believe you can see the building that houses Nye's on the right (with the curved top edge). I also found this photo of a Polish Army recruitment center that was located on the same block in 1918, which gives you a sense of what the neighborhood was like when the bar that preceded Nye's, Hefron's, opened at the turn of the century.

From Nye's website:

Opening in 1950, Nye's Polonaise Room hasn't changed a whole lot since then. But if we go further back, the building it occupies dates from the 1880s and for years was home to a working man's bar named Hefron's.

It's hard to believe that over two months have passed since I was in Greece. I suppose part of me is still lingering over on that side of the ocean; as my friend Sandy said at dinner tonight, "It seems like you wish you were still there."

I'm still sorting out all thing things I saw, smelled, tasted, felt. I'm still sorting out what it means that I felt so peaceful there. And I'm still trying to figure out how to replicate all of that amazing food—the heaps of fresh salad, the fried cheeses, the fish roasted whole with only simple lemon and olive oil garnish that somehow tasted better and more complex than any seafood I'd had at home.

As my friends can attest, the one thing I've definitely managed to perfect so far is the Greek way of serving food. Which is to say that I cook too much of it every single time, and send everyone home with Tupperwares overflowing. I've been wanting to share the recipes I've learned so far—some that I learned directly from friends in Greece, and others that I've cobbled together based on trial and error back home—and also share some of the stories that have been bubbling up as I remember back on that trip. Every so often I'll post a new dish and a new little memory.

To begin, here's a recipe for hpiti, a spicy Greek feta cheese deep that we devoured several times while visiting Paros. The little cafe in the center of town would bring out dishes of this stuff without even asking, and we would eat it while drinking glasses of suma (a homemade grapa specific to Paros that tasted an awful lot like moonshine... my chest still burns) or bottles of Fix beer. Serve it with a hearty, multi-grain bread or some pita.

Hpiti - Spicy Greek Feta Cheese Dip

Serves 4-6 as an appetizer

7-8 oz. sheep's milk feta 7-8 oz. roasted red peppers 1-2 scallions 1 garlic clove 1 tsp. red chili flakes (more or less to taste) 1 tsp. smoked paprika 1 tbsp. olive oil 1 tbsp. lemon juice

The short version of this recipe is that you pretty much throw everything into a blender. But since this is a blog post I'd better walk you through this step by step. Buckle up: It's really, really complicated.

(Actually it's the easiest recipe I've learned so far. You could totally do this drunk if you had to. Here, hold my hand.)

First things first, round up all of the ingredients and introduce them to one another. What a nice lookin' bunch.

The next step is getting all of these bad boys into your food processor. Toss the feta in first—as mentioned above, a nice sheep's milk feta works best—followed by everything else.

Oh! And here comes literally the most complicated part of the whole endeavor: It's a good idea to pat the red peppers dry before adding them to the food processor, since too much moisture will make the dip runny. As you can see here, this is a really exhausting ordeal and requires you to dip into your beloved paper towel supply.

Once you've cleared that hurdle it should be smooth sailing. Add the peppers, scallions, garlic, and seasonings to the food processor bowl, sprinkle a little lemon juice on top, and pulse/stir until the ingredients start to meld together. It's important not to over-mix it, here—I like to pulse it a couple of times, add a drizzle of olive oil, pulse it a couple more times, then stop to mash down any larger chunks that rise to the top.

Here I am, mashing.

Stop once all the lumps are gone but before it turns watery. You should end up with a delicious, fluffy, spicy-but-not-too-crazy-for-Minnesotans cheese dip that pairs excellently with a hearty whole wheat bread.

You did it! Not so bad, right? The best part is that you can totally prepare this up to a day ahead of time, and people will look at you like you're a magician when you pull it out of the fridge. You can easily double the recipe, too, since most roasted red peppers come in a 12-16 oz. jar, and you'll end up with enough cheese to feed a dozen people or more.

Now, as promised, here's a little story from my first night in Paros, Greece.

-----

Welcome to Paros

Dora rolled down the window and suddenly everything smelled like dust. Not just dust, but decay and age—the smell of rocks that had been rained on for tens of thousands of years and somehow never washed away, and of a place that had seen so many bodies get born and die that you could almost feel them dissolving all around you.

We were whipping through the dark, winding roads of Paros, Greece, in a tiny red Fiat. Dora was at the wheel, our dear friend Jun was in the passenger's seat, and my newlywed husband, Ben, was beside me in the back. It was our honeymoon, we had just arrived on the island, and I was the furthest from home I'd ever been in my life.

Things hadn't necessarily gone smoothly on the trip so far. We started our adventure in Paris, the City of Light, the supposed most romantic city on Earth, where I turned 31 and where we jumped over the hurdles of jetlag and fatigue with varying degrees of success. There were emotional meltdowns and romantic dinners and accidental naps and declarations of love, and we eventually landed in a heap in Greece, finally finding a bit of footing on this side of the Atlantic. Riding our tiny plane into Paros that afternoon felt like descending down into an idyllic seaside dreamscape where we could finally find some peace. Sitting in the backseat of the Fiat that night, Greek folk music blaring out of the stereo, I found myself grinning giddily out into the black unknown.

If surviving five days in Paris felt like such a triumph, what about these rolling hills of history and these centuries of ruin and resilience? Although Paros is nothing like New York City, which I ironically find to be one of the most restorative places in the world, I felt similarly inconsequential and serene flailing through those sharp turns and backroads.

When we finally got to the other side of the island—where we were heading to see Dora's brother play in a punk band—I got out of the car and instinctively walked toward the beach, sucking in the smoldering ashes of the eons and the piercing, salty air. My chest ached but I could feel the happiness flooding back, too: We were surrounded by water and wisdom and I couldn't wait to soak up what this place would teach me.

When I moved out of the apartment where I had spent the most tumultuous years of my mid-20s and into my first two-story house, the youngest of my two cats, Birdie, gained two pounds. Two pounds may not seem like a lot, but for little runt-of-the-litter Birdie it meant that she was suddenly 150 percent of her original size, her body stretching longer and her haunches thicker and stronger than they ever were before. I didn’t even need to weigh her to know that she had changed; at the apartment, she had spent most of her hours tucking her meek white and grey body into the corners of closets and crawlspaces, desperate for a pocket of space to call her own. In the house, she will curl up next to me on the couch or bed, and even greet company when they stop by for a visit. She is confident and affectionate, chirping happily as she trots around—she’s practically a brand new cat.

It’s been years now since bashful four-pound Birdie transitioned into brave six-pound Birdie, and it’s hard for me to describe just how significant that move was to people who meet her. “She grew—like a goldfish,” I’ve told friends again and again, but I don’t think cats biologically respond to their surroundings like pet fish, accordioning to fit the space around them. So how do I explain that, as far as I can tell, Birdie needed to live in a house with extra rooms and stairs and a yard in order to become the courageous and empathetic cat she was meant to be?

I was thinking a lot about Birdie on my most recent trip to New York City. It was my seventh trip since first visiting the enormous, sprawling metropolis five years ago, and every time I return I get an adrenaline rush as soon as I see the skyline. As I move through the city, I enter what feels like a meditative state. I ride the subway in blissful anonymity, at peace with my nothingness and marveling at how utterly inconsequential I am to this great big world around me. It might sound counterintuitive, but I go to New York, one of the busiest and most bustling cities in the world, to reconnect with my innermost desires and revel in peaceful solitude.

This time I spent half the trip lost in thought. As I rode the subway cars with my newlywed husband, Ben, and wandered up one block and down another, I could feel myself deflecting one question after another: What’s going to happen to us next? What does it mean that I feel so peaceful here, and that Ben and I seem so happy? Is it just because we’re on vacation? What if we lived here? Could we raise a child in this place, or would that wait until later? Maybe I would lose weight from all the walking, or write a book, or play in a jazz band? What kind of fantastic life could we imagine living out on these dark streets?

On the plane ride out to New York I read a beautiful book by a Minnesota author named Kate Hopper about her experience having a preemie baby. In the book, she finds respite in a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke that I hadn’t heard before, and I found myself repeating it in my head again and again as I paced through Manhattan.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves," the quote goes. "The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Live the questions now. Live the questions now. I said it over and over like a mantra, thinking about what Kate had gone through in the book and how tortured I was over a period in my life that was decidedly free of trauma. But the truth is, despite all of the happy developments of the past two years—getting married to a man whom I love deeply and profoundly, and working through one of the most exciting creative periods of my life—I still find myself teetering atop a precipice, desperate to look out into the future and see what comes next.

People talk a lot about the process of getting married, and grappling with what they want to do professionally, and the fear and overwhelming love that sweeps over them when they find out they are pregnant or their first child is born. But what about this grey period that falls between? What about the agonizingly long year or more that might stretch out between when you know you want something, and when you feel like you might finally be ready to dive in? How will I know I’m ready to take the next step? Will Ben know he’s ready? What if we never are?

How long have I been holding my breath in like this?

Every time we go back to New York, I take Ben on at least one dizzying quest to find a place where we can see the whole city at once. We’ve taken ferries to Staten Island and back; we’ve climbed the hills that lead up to the Cloisters; and we’ve paid tourist fees to skyrocket up to the top of the Rockefeller Center—all so I can breathe in the magnitude of the city try to wrap my arms around its endless possibilities.

This time, we rode a subway car underneath the waters of the East River, popped out of a staircase in the trendy neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and walked westward until we hit the riverfront so we could drink in the Manhattan skyline at dusk.

On the ride over, the Rilke quote was still ringing in one ear—Live the questions—but so was the melody of a song by an artist from Minneapolis named Dan Wilson:

In the air the questions hang Will we get to do something? Who’re we gonna end up being? How’re we gonna end up feeling? Whatcha gonna spend your free life on?

Standing on the bank of the river in Brooklyn, as the sun set behind the south end of Manhattan, I scanned the city from end to end. I couldn’t believe how short the distance seemed between the new Freedom Tower to my left and the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings to my right. I knew that the island of Manhattan was only two miles wide and eight miles long, but suddenly it was astonishing to me how manageable it all seemed. I finally knew how to navigate the subway system without getting lost, I knew how to shout my bagel order over the counter without my inner Minnesotan getting embarrassed, and I knew which buildings were in which parts of town, and where the good places were to eat, drink, and live. When had all this happened?

“It looks smaller from here. Doesn’t it look smaller?” I asked Ben, shaking my head. He smiled and shrugged.

Of course the city hadn’t changed at all, at least not in any sizable way we could scope out from that shoreline. But like Birdie had transformed when I moved her into the bigger house, I wondered if this time it was I who had grown. With the wind at my back and the sun sinking behind the buildings in front of me the city fell quiet, and, just for a moment, all of the questions faded away.

The first thing I noticed about her was her hands.

They were dainty and mangled, with each finger starting out on a straight path before being derailed at the knuckle, a row of swollen joints slanting each digit sideways. As she sat deep in thought she rubbed her hands slowly and gently, trading off which hand would go on top like a diner at a sushi restaurant rubs their chopsticks together to make sure there are no splinters.

Despite how painfully arthritic her fingers looked, she still had perfectly manicured nails, and they glimmered under the fluorescent lights with a rosy, pink shine. After we had exchanged niceties and it became clear that she wanted me to sit down across from her and chat, I decided that asking her about something as simple as her fingernails might be a good way to ease into a conversation.

“Oh these?,” she said, bringing her knobby hands up close to her face.

“Aren’t they beautiful? I saw them at the department store. They had these gorgeous nails on display in the front window, on this little rack.” She spread out her fingers as wide as she could. “I couldn’t believe how lovely they were.”

It didn’t make any sense, but I nodded anyway and smiled, hoping she would keep talking. We had started out on rough footing—I think I had caught her off guard when I approached her, and she gave me a gruff, “Whaddya want?”—and I didn’t want to risk confusing her anymore than she clearly already was.

She smiled at me with an overwhelming politeness. She was sitting up perfectly straight on the edge of a sofa, her hair curled into a flawlessly smooth coiffure and her stretchy cotton leggings tucked into clunky, oversized white sneakers, and she carried herself like she was entertaining a roomful of well-to-do revelers at a cocktail party, swiveling her head slowly around the room as she spoke.

“I just got married,” I blurted out, hoping that would nudge our conversation along. “It was a beautiful day. We got married outside in a park, and on the way to the reception there was this crazy storm, but then it was all beautiful again.”

She gasped, and for the first time her eyes locked in on mine, the faintest hint of familiarity lighting up her face and making her silvery irises glint and glow. “Oh, isn’t that wonderful?,” she cooed. “They say rain on a wedding day is good luck. It sounds like you’ll be set!” She let out a cackle and it grew into a hearty laugh, her shoulders bouncing up and down as she enjoyed some kind of inside joke with herself.

“Do you remember your wedding day?,” I asked, and she fell silent, contemplating how to answer my question. I feared I had lost her again, and I could see her eyes going dull and dark, like she was time-traveling to some other dimension.

Before she could answer, another old woman with tousled grey hair standing straight up off her head sat down on the couch and began hollering in our general direction. “Alice!” she barked. “Alice, show her your turkey!"

The woman with the knobby hands and perfect hair snapped back to life, looking over at her companion and then blinking into the fluorescent light, as if waking from an afternoon nap. “Do you want to see it?,” she asked, looking at me eagerly.

“Sure,” I said, and watched her as she slowly rose off the couch and tiptoed across the room, one big bulky tennis shoe in front of the other, to peel a construction paper turkey off a glass window and carry it back to me.

She sat down closer to me this time and held the paper turkey in my hands. Everything about the little crafted creature was delicate and perfect, just like her, with each piece glued right where it was supposed to be and a name written neatly in cursive at its base: “Alice.”

Before I could say anything she dropped the turkey into my lap, grabbed one of my hands and held it up in front of her face. I could see that she was looking at my fingernails, in all their rough, unmanicured, bitten-down ugliness, and was examining the bumps and ridges that have always made my thumbnails especially unsightly.

I looked down at my hand in hers, and for the first time I noticed that her thumbnails were bumpy and full of ridges, too.

“Why do you think our thumbs are like that?” I asked her. “Do you think it’s genetic?”

She looked into my eyes again, and just then the light returned to her face as her head tilted to one side and her own eyes started welling up with tears. I didn’t know what she knew, but as she squeezed my hand tighter it was all I could do to keep from crying myself.

When I was two years old my parents made the wise decision to move out of the teeny tiny trailer they were renting in Barnum, Minnesota, and buy their first teeny tiny house in the neighboring town of Moose Lake. I don’t really remember the move, of course, but my mom likes to tell the story of how I darted through the house during a walk-through frantically trying to flip on all the light switches before the electricity had been turned on and marveling at the fact that I’d have my own room. A few years later, my parents would let me choose the paint color for that room, and I would pick out a blaring Pepto Bismol pink. My bedroom was just large enough to fit a twin bed, desk, dresser, and shelf overflowing with toys, and was so poorly insulated that they would tuck me underneath six or seven blankets in the winter to keep me warm; to this day, I still sleep best in cool air, with a heavy weight pressing down upon me. But it was the first space that I remember having the privilege to call my own, and I lived there for 10 years--the longest stretch of time I’ve spent tied to a single residence so far in this life. What the house lacked in square feet it made up for in property value, as it sat directly across the street from the shore of the town’s namesake Moosehead Lake. For a long stretch of my childhood I recall sitting out on the dock after dinner and watching the sun go down over the water. As I remember it, I was often alone on that dock, but the truth probably was that I was just far enough out of reach of my parents that it gave me my first taste of independence. As soon as I got permission to ride my bike without supervision I would take off down the street and pedal alongside the lake for a good mile, then pull my bike up under the Main Street bridge and sit cross-legged on the bank right where the Moose Head River bubbled into the lake. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that little lakeshore house and the hours spent communing with the water taught me the value of solitude and savoring the rare quiet moment; it’s something I still seek out to this day, especially now that I live in a much faster paced city. I remember so many of the details of that house vividly. The wood-paneled walls; the drab brown carpet; the rotary dial telephone that hung in the hall outside my room; the three steps that led down from the dining room to the living room and were the site of so many dance performances and mini-plays. I remember when we got our first computer, and how the dot matrix printer clacked and sputtered so loudly that it would drown out the TV. I remember waking up in a fright and doing an army-crawl from my room to the edge of my parents’ waterbed, convinced that either a robber or a bear or perhaps an especially skilled robber-bear was going to apprehend me in the night. And I remember that there was always music, whether it was my dad playing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” on his acoustic guitar to soothe a tantrum or my mom playing movie themes on the piano or the turntable spinning Linda Rondstandt, Paul Simon, and endless Beatles, Beatles, Beatles as we all sang along. It was just the three of us, and inside those walls we formed a unit that felt impenetrable. When I was halfway through sixth grade my parents sat me down at our cramped dinner table -- an arrangement so compact that I would have to stand up and move my chair in order for someone to access to the oven, which never seemed like an inconvenience but now feels ridiculous -- and told me that it looked like we were going to have to move. The Moose Lake State Hospital, where my dad worked as a physical therapist for my entire childhood and where he had met my mother while she was working a summer job there during college, was going to close. My dad was being transferred to some faraway place named Faribault to help them close another state hospital, and my mom and I were going with him to find a house and live in a suburb called Apple Valley. The schools there were excellent, my parents said. I would have more opportunities, my parents said. But I didn’t care. It wasn’t Moose Lake. And I somehow knew that nothing would ever feel the same again. Since that time, my roots have remained deeply planted in my hometown. All four of my grandparents still live in Moose Lake and Barnum, and each trip up north is accompanied by a nostalgic lap around the lake and a drive past my old house, which until this year had endured a couple of questionable exterior paint jobs and one particularly neglectful owner but otherwise remained exactly the same. There was something reassuring about driving past it and glimpsing, even for a moment, my old blissfully simple life. But Moose Lake has also been a great source of sadness for me. In one particularly devastating year, I received a string of terrible updates from the homeland: A childhood friend who I had known since daycare had dropped dead of a brain aneurysm just days before graduating from high school. A young woman from my church who was just a year or two older than me was abducted from a gas station at the edge of town, went missing for quite some time, and eventually was discovered to have suffered a brutal and horrifying death. And another friend, this time an elementary school classmate, was struck and killed by a drunk driver while out on a dark farm road delivering a pizza. I was 16 at the time of all those tragedies, and each update pricked another hole into my deflating psyche. Though I wouldn’t find a way to verbalize it until years later, those Moose Lake heartbreaks shoved me into my first throes of depression, and effectively shattered the illusion of bulletproof security and the innocence of my childhood. So when I found out that the same river I used to flock to as a kid was overflowing and dumping incalculable gallons of extra water into my beloved Moosehead Lake, it felt like jumping up to try to sprint on a broken foot that’s never quite healed. The ache returned immediately as I watched video of an old neighbor -- a boy I used to baby-sit when he was only one year old! -- grapple with the fact that his own childhood home was filling with water. And it grew into a throbbing sadness when I saw an old fifth-grade teacher, who is now the superintendent of the entire district, stand atop the roof of my elementary school and look out at a playground and campus submerged with water, rendered powerless by the disaster. Thankfully, my grandparents escaped the floodwaters and their house at the edge of town remains unharmed, but many old neighbors and friends did not fare as well. Today, news came that my old house suffered so much damage in the flood that it has been deemed uninhabitable and condemned. There’s a good chance that my next trip home will be my final chance to take a leisurely drive around the lakeshore and see that house standing. It seems illogical to mourn a building, but with this news I’ve suddenly found that a term I learned just this year, “ambiguous loss,” has taken on a profound meaning. It’s not the first time Moose Lake has endured such grand devastation. In 1918, my great-grandmother was among the many residents who fled into the water and watched as a fire tore apart their town and burned their houses to the ground. The town persevered and rebuilt and eventually rejoiced, and they will do it again following this year’s flood. And as the town rises once again so will I, each of us spurned on by the defiant resilience of nature and community and human life. So I suppose that in the midst of this ambiguous loss, there is solace: I know, now, how to ebb and flow. I learned it from the water.