tonight, i stood in the snow--

And I listened. Snow at night is something else. Our chickens are in their coop, and our aging golden retriever hobbled through the snow, probably grateful for the grip, so I was far from being alone, the lights from the kitchen leaning out, my children's shrieking laughter wafting out from the barely-shut patio door. I'm trying to get the sounds of it. There's so much to it: the shushing, the creaking, the rubbing of wood on wood, the popping as the crystals break. And so much of it, too, still silence. Thinking to this manuscript: what would it sound like if it seemed to never stop? How would that sound change over time? Over days, weeks? Can the sound ever be flushed once it does finally stop?

When we moved into the converted church along the river where my husband went to gradate school, everyone gaped at how close the train ran. I thought it would torture my sleep, but the opposite occurred: it lulled. And I missed it. Eventually, we moved back to a house not far from the tracks again and our visitors struggle with it, but to us, it's a part of the night's soundscape.

Snow's sounds change the more you have too: the weight of it, the pressure, the ache of it.

For now, I'm looking closely. Watching and listening.

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.

winter solstice 2018

To all on the longest night of the year: so much love, and bonfire-lit hope, so much to new writing and new making. We've almost turned over into the new year; I'm looking at this winter as a time of creation and generation. This summer, I will head to Tennessee for my first writing residency, where I hope I'll be able to lay out so many new poems and see how it could all fall together. Today, too, is the last day of teaching for 2018, and I have a lot of gratitude in my heart for the journey I'm on, where I've ended up, and where I'm headed. 

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.