Bell with the bear

My daughter's nickname is the bear, because of how she'd growl when she nursed. I misread an event at the Bell--I thought there was some guided artmaking there, but it turns out Wet Paint borrowed some of their gorgeous artifacts, so we thought we would spend a little time in the touch exhibit, then head over to the Food exhibit, which we missed last time.

 

So my proud bragging rights moment: I touched a tarantula. It means everything psychological, which is maybe why I did it and felt fine. If I had to pick it up, that would have involved more physical risk. After teaching Montessori for two years, we learned to interact with critters in some really wonderful ways. (Side note: I miss our corn snake.) I was nervous at first with Lamar, but she grew on me so fast.

Above: gardens of the future?

Below: an Americana in great taxidermied shape, which is strange to look at when you have seven chickens of various types, including three Americana, pecking around your backyard. But here is one, completely still, set under glass.

Above: I want to spend more time exploring this, the preservation techniques with food.

Below: The people around me probably thought I was a bit strange, we shall say, when we came to this part of the exhibit. I have a poem that is being considered by a few journals called "The Unburying of Otzi," based on a documentary about this 5,000 year old frozen man discovered in the ice. My daughter didn't quite understand why I was so excited to see this part of the exhibit, but I felt a little kismet.

Things seem to speak directly to what I think I'd like to do with this manuscript, and there's always another layer--many, many layers--each time I visit.

I have to end with this: Maya doing the mating dance with the sandhill crane. It's their favorite spot. Aside from that little window into the beaver dam. And touching all of the pelts. And watching scientists talk about their work. And looking in the drawers at the stones, trying to decide which ones to bring home to add to their rock collection. Bonus points for geodes.

bell: with research assistants

After a solo trip, my children, wriggling and sweet with curiosity, begged to go to the Bell, and it wasn't hard for me to say yes. It's the first day of winter break, and I have much to reflect on by way of reading (not just scientific research, but also deep dives into poetry collections), but before I do that, here's another photographic reflection on our walk-through this day-after-solstice. I noticed new things (above, bezoar--a cow hairball; further in, just below the polar bear paws is the start of an earth core, a display I know I'll need to return to and meditate on) but the real pleasure was watching my two littles experience the exhibits for the first time. (For the record, their favorite is an interactive mating dance done with a sandhill crane; my son kept doing it again and again and again. Bow, flap, leap!) I love this place.

a walk through the bell

Because the sequence of poems I am working on is so steeped in the natural world, and because every trip I make after this might involve the youngers in our family, and because it is nearly winter break and my own students are as ready for it as I am, my husband gifted me the morning and afternoon to myself, so I went to the Twin Cities and purchased a household membership to the Bell Museum.

The manuscript I'm interested in developing began as a way of combining the passions of my family: my husband and his roots in stream ecology and the mapmaking world of GIS; my daughter's intense brilliance when it comes to the lives of animals, their habitats, their behaviors, and other specificities; and my son, whose interest in being a helper has led me to imagine a family modeled after our own in which they are experiencing catastrophic events of climate change, where the father goes in search of mythic ways into the earth (see: animal habitats in winter) as a way to ride out a storm. I wanted to think of a way, instead of searching outside of our planet (see: explorations of Mars) for rescue from our own destruction, we go into the womb of the planet we live on. Why would we do that, if climate change is warming, and going further into the Earth is also warmer and warmer?

I can see I'm already spilling too much; I'll leave it at that for now, especially as I am in the embryonic stages of developing this book. I've got a handful of poems already, ones based on this visit, ones based on the glimmers of ideas, ones that come from watching a documentary with my daughter, and memories I have of winters in Minnesota. It's a new foray, thinking speculatively about very real scientific issues, especially when my own writing tends to be so experience-based, but this will be too: walks in the woods, passionate research, the roots in my own family of four, but then so many what if questions (which I live with every day from that girl of mine) pumping around the action of the book.

For now, I'll share the photographs I took at the museum, where answers to so many of my questions as I write and think this manuscript out, exist. I didn't want this to be a fact collecting experience though; I have many more visits in my future to do this. I didn't even want to answer any of my initial questions. I wanted this to be a first tour of a place I know I'll return to, filling in pieces: spending time with the mural that is the image of the layers of earth and rock beneath the Twin Cities, spending time with the Jim Brandenburg film on seasonal Minnesota, looking at the places where our biomes meet and considering how the rivers move out of our state in varying directions. I wanted this to be an initial visit of wonder before I got to the real work of finding answers.

I had two really fantastic conversations with two people working in the museum--one an undergraduate employee who talked to me about mammoths and muskoxes and the other a volunteer who told me some really amazing things about Glacial Lake Aggasiz and the moraines and ice dams breaking and I just felt so silly and giddy and a little weepy in amazement at all that was available for my brain and my kids', who also feel this hungry curiosity about the natural world.