scenes from duluth: we arrive

My husband offered a choice: a gift for the holidays or a trip. This was not a hard decision, even as he showed me an enormous loom he found for sale, all the wires and enormous heddles terrifying (and intriguing!) me. We went to Duluth, where I took a few photographs of the lake in all its early winter mysteriousness from the window. The trip was a much-needed reset of my sense of place, the geography of my manuscript being so critical, and knowing what various ecosystems do as winter settles in a big part of that. I will post a few sequences of photographs I took as I begin to think of how winter can be so beautiful and destructive at once. I often think of those who lose family members in winter car accidents or snowmobile mishaps (or, as I lost a student, snowboarding accidents): here is this weather that will change in six months time to circumstances very different, the triggering something completely missing from the scenario, and thus, the ghost-self passes over the landscape, safe, forgetting what it is like to spin desperately out of control and into oblivion.

I've begun writing questions I have for this manuscript in the margins of my two writing notebooks: there is one I am using for the hard research that comes from scientific books, and there is the creative notebook that is developed while reading other books of poetry (thus, a kind of reading journal), but also whatever writing I generate as a result of that or the other. There are so many things I want to know about water cycles in winter, about denning and oxygen, about glaciers and weather and currents. I love how curious this work is making me. I turned to my husband on our drive home and said, I feel overwhelmed by all of these questions I have. And he said to me, Now you know a little bit what it's like to be our daughter. I love this connection.