Unexpected Art at Hennepin History Museum

Recently I met some friends at the Hennepin History Museum to see an exhibition of works by Becka Rahn inspired by objects in three local museums: HHM, the Bakken Museum, and The Museum of Russian Art (TMORA).

The exhibition, titled Unexpected Art: Surface design inspired by museum collections, features garments made from fabrics printed with motifs taken from a few museum objects selected by the artist. Each work is accompanied by a paper plaque with the image of a fancy frame, showing a photo of the original object when it was from one of the other two museums, and the artist's statement about it. For objects from HHM, the actual item was displayed alongside the creation it inspired.

The above is all paper, it just looks like a fancy frame enclosing a plaque.

Rahn made the motifs into surface design patterns, digitally printed those on fabric, then used the fabric to make garments she designed. The garment designs, as well as the motifs printed on the fabric, reflected Rahn's response to the selected object.

The paint palette of portrait artist Frances Cranmer Greenman, in the collection of the Hennepin History Museum

I was perplexed by her choice to use polyester fabric, which I thought detracted from her designs and skilled workmanship. It isn't just that I have a bias against petroleum-based synthetics, although I do, but also because such fabrics lack the crispness, body, and drape that would have shown her creations to best advantage. 

Dress inspired by Greenman's palette, with a scan of a portion of the palette providing the pattern for the colorful skirt panels.

It's possible that the polyester was better for printing on with an inkjet printer, which is what she said she used. But on a table displaying printed fabric samples, there were a few squares of cotton, and it looked like they took the ink very nicely. Despite that minor disappointment, I really enjoyed the exhibition and was inspired by it. 

I especially appreciated one she called "Glimmer of Green," where she used security envelopes to make paper collages inspired by a semi-surreal painting from TMORA by a dissident artist in the Soviet era, showing a small-town cathedral in Russia, which then became the pattern motif for a fabric that she made into a top.

As she states, the security envelopes relate to the idea that this painting, as well as others that did not conform to official standards, was hidden, secretive.

Paper collages made with security envelopes and other papers, inspired by the painting Uspenski Cathedral in a Village from the Museum of Russian Art

The collages themselves could have stood alone as finished artworks, except it appeared that such was not her intention; some of the pieces showed signs of coming detached from the background, and they were not coated or finished. 

I'm only showing you a very small sample of the works included and I do encourage you to see the rest of them up close and personal, which is quite possible in an intimate setting such as HHM, relying as they do on "Please do not touch" signs rather than barriers, so you can get really close to the works and related artifacts to examine them in detail.

In the second room, there was a board displaying a lot of doorknobs, some of which had labels identifying which buildings they came from, but most without any identifying labels. 

Detail of some of the doorknobs at HHM. The one on the right is featured in part on the exhibition postcard.

It's clearly an old object in the museum's collection of Minneapolis artifacts, and I don't recall seeing it on display before. 

It's really quite a delight in itself, and I don't recall what she made from these motifs, other than the postcard for the exhibition, and a zippered pouch for sale in the museum shop. Although some of the doorknob motifs may have made their way into this collage, which became another patterned fabric.

After leaving the museum I was walking up the street with my friend Ann, on our way to meet other friends at the Boiler Room coffee shop. As I was admiring the old apartment buildings we passed along the way, Ann commented on the architectural detail in the building facades. 

We were both experiencing a renewed awareness of and appreciation for the surface design and motifs all around us, inspired by the explorations of this particular artist.

Unexpected Art is on display through April 30 at the Hennepin History Museum, 2303 Third Ave. S., Minneapolis 55404.


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Equinox sunset walk

Finally rousting myself from my winter sedentariness this past week, I started going for a walk in the morning before breakfast. This is not so ambitious as it probably sounds—I seldom eat breakfast before 10 a.m., and I seldom rise earlier than 8:30.

Nine-ish in the morning is really an excellent time for a walk this time of year, when the sun is fairly high and the air is warming up. The school buses have finished their rounds and the commuters have driven away and it's really pretty quiet around here.

I enjoy listening to the chatter of birds and observing the gradual greening of my neighborhood. It helps that my neighborhood borders on the Mississippi River and Minnehaha Falls.

Minnehaha Falls on March 16

But, I have arthritic knees, I'm overweight, and I'm out of practice—yes, walking is a practice, and subject to both good and bad habits, like everything else. So these walks have resulted in my knees hurting all day long, relieved only partially by the yoga I do afterwards, and the bike rides I take later on each day. They always recover by the next morning, so I figure it's a problem that will gradually get better as I continue to do it; especially as I start practicing Feldenkrais again, which I wrote about some time ago here. When I stopped my one-on-one lessons, I bought a set of CDs by Feldenkrais guru Russell Delman for practicing on my own, but until this week they sat largely untouched.

On Friday I decided I was tired of the day-long pain and skipped the morning walk. I did some yoga and had my usual bike ride of about 5 or 6 miles, with a stop at a coffee shop, of course (because bike riding is about the journey and the destination, for me). At suppertime I was commenting about how pleasant it was to not have pain all day.

But as I sat at the supper table looking out our west-facing windows, I was totally enchanted by the beautiful colors that were playing across the western sky. And then I remembered that it was the vernal equinox. So I decided to take a walk at sunset—an old-fashioned "evening constitutional," I told my husband—reasoning that I would only have pain for the evening and be recovered as usual by morning.

Looking west on East 46th Street at 7:11 p.m., Friday, March 20, 2015

I stopped while crossing East 46th Street to admire the perfect symmetry of the equinox sunset, and then continued on to the falls to take in the beauty and watch several Somali immigrants enjoying this stunning natural feature in the midst of our urban neighborhood.

Afterwards, I did a little yoga and then had a bath, massaging my knee a bit while it was immersed in the warm water. My knees didn't feel too bad after this, and, as usual, they were just fine in the morning.

Minnehaha Falls, about 7:20 p.m., March 20, 2015

I think I'll continue with the evening walks, and make time for my Feldenkrais "awareness through movement" lessons more regularly, and eventually resume the morning walks as well.

And when I go for a walk after supper, hubby washes the dishes. Maybe I should start doing the cooking more often.

Plaid Friday — It's a thing!

Image "borrowed" from Minneapolis Happening Mag

First, I'll just admit that I have never liked "Black Friday." The name just sounds dreary and ominous, and the shopping frenzy at the mall and big box stores even worse. I've never really understood the appeal or why so many people want to subject themselves to it, and with such zeal, no less.

So then there was Buy Nothing Day, an anti-consumerism campaign started by Ad Busters; an understandable rebellion against the rampant consumerism that reaches such a fevered pitch at this time of year.

But that always seemed a little extreme to me. Sure, I could take all the money I would normally spend for gifts and decor and such and give it to some worthy charities instead, while spending the holiday season on meaningful activities that don't involve buying things.

But, let's be honest here: What's the fun in that?

I think Buy Nothing Day misses a very important point: that it's possible to engage in the consumer economy in a moderate, enjoyable, and beneficial way, and set aside some of your holiday budget to give to charity.

And I think it overlooks the equally important fact that it isn't just about the mega retailers who depend upon Christmas shopping to keep their shareholders happy. Small, independent businesses in our communities need our dough for their very survival; and they aren't asking for charity, they're offering an excellent value, because they not only sell cool stuff—unique items, often locally  handmade, quirky secondhand goods, or imported through fair trade cooperatives, that you won't find at the big stores—but they also provide a pleasant, personal shopping experience, and help to make our neighborhoods vibrant.

So along comes Plaid Friday. Started in Oakland, California, in 2010, it's an initiative of small independent businesses to promote shopping local and small on what is otherwise known as Black Friday. And they encourage people to wear plaid while doing so!

The plaid gambit isn't just a playful thumbing of noses against the big guys, although that would be reason enough to get on the plaid bandwagon, but it was conceived as symbolic of:

weaving the individual threads of small businesses together to create a strong fabric that celebrates the diversity and creativity of independent businesses  (From the Plaid Friday website.)

It's been spreading throughout the country since its inception in 2010, and it has recently come to the Twin Cities (possibly last year, though I only learned about it a few days ago). 

I may have to start my plaid Friday outing by shopping for a plaid scarf to wear.

April Snow Showers and Flowers in the House

April 4, 2014 -- no kidding! There's a garden under there somewhere.

Just last week a long winter's worth of snow was nearly all gone, and then on Friday we got dumped on with six inches of the heavy wet white stuff! But today, as I was out riding my bike and wearing a cotton sweater and no gloves, I noticed that it's all gone, again. Isn't April just a barrel of fun, though?

So I'm delighted that another floriferous blog tour has rolled around courtesy of Flower Jane so I can look longingly at the lovely blossoms plucked from people's gardens, even as I bloomify my home's interior using my frequent excuse that I'm supporting a local independent business, while eyeing my patches of dirt for any sign of emerging life.

I've had this sweet little orchid since early February, when I brought it home from the co-op, and I'm so pleased that it's blossoms are so long lasting. I think it must like this cool spot on the buffet in a north window.









These daffodils, which I bought today, aren't really ready for their closeup yet, but I'm guessing they'll open up and look quite cheery and bright by the weekend, when we're supposed to get another round of slushy snow.

Tres (the big white-and-gray cat in the window) eyes the daffodils.

And orange tulips! What fun! I placed them in a heavy pitcher and set that in a big ceramic bowl, hoping that will be sufficient to keep my three bad kitties from knocking them over.

The daffodils in their little glass tumbler cut from a Carlsberg beer bottle I may need to move to a safer spot, though.

Bad kitty! (This is Phinney, about 9 months old.)

Repurposing colorful postcards

We're looking forward to the LoLa art crawl this weekend at our house. It's a self-guided tour of artists in the greater Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis and this is my third year participating — for the first two years I was stationed at a local business, so this is the first year I'm going to be at my own house, with fellow artist and friend Brian Western of Western Art Glass holding court in the living room while I turn the dining room into my personal art gallery.

I was going to set Brian up in the front porch, because I thought his art glass fish and leaves would look swell dangling in our lovely new windows. But the weather forecast says we're going to be seeing temps above 90 again this weekend, and the porch can get pretty darned uncomfortable when the temperature soars, even with those energy-efficient windows (there's no vent out there, for one thing).

So hubby took compassion on dear Brian and invited him into the living room, despite his earlier declaration that he wanted the living room to sit and read the Sunday paper. (That was in response to my suggestion that we invite a third artist to share the space.) Despite Brian's misgivings that hubby might be inclined to hang out in his underwear on a Sunday morning, he accepted the offer to be inside with the air conditioning.

I suggested to hubby that he get a pair of silk pajamas and a smoking jacket, but then he'd have to take up smoking, which we don't allow in the house. So I think he'll be in his usual attire: shorts and a T-shirt.

But the house is getting dressed up for the occasion, at least.

And now that I've cut LoLa postcards into fish to hang in the door (in lieu of Brian's fish in the window, as I had originally anticipated), and taped another batch of them to a string as LoLa prayer flags, I'm finding myself thinking about other uses for leftover LoLa postcards.

LoLa artist Anita White makes them into puppets.

I might make them into notebooks. Hmmm.

Epistle of a Bitter Neighbor

I think that every block must have its bitter neighbor, which can take the form of the charming curmudgeon, if you get along with them, or the recalcitrant grump, whom nobody gets along with. I wonder which sort the folks at Third Street Brewery were thinking of when they named their black IPA Bitter Neighbor?

I like the box so much that I persuaded my husband to give it a try. I'm sure that I sampled it too, but now I don't remember if I liked it. Liking a beer, for me, means that I'm happy to drink a half pint and then I'm done.

But having secured the box, I repurposed it into a journal, assembled and sewn in the secret Belgian style, my new favorite bookbinding method. Hubby suggested that I really should give this, or one like it, to the folks who bought our old house, which sits across the street from a truly bitter neighbor of the latter variety. I laughed at the reminder, but I have to admit, it often wasn't so funny living within the orbit of this man's relentless unhappiness.

It began soon after we moved in and Mike came over to introduce himself and immediately set about letting us know what a bad neighborhood we had just moved into. Having just relocated from a neighborhood with an active gang problem, the memory of an armed man cutting through our front yard as I looked out the window still fresh in my mind, I thought, Yeah, right. Like you even know what a bad neighborhood is.

As it turned out, the only thing bad about our new neighborhood was Mike. While our previous block had an active and friendly block club (men with guns will inspire that), we discovered that our new neighbors didn't want to form a block club because nobody wanted to attend a meeting where Mike was present.

His unrelenting complaints about everybody else on the block got tedious pretty fast, and soon he was directing his complaints against us. Our dog barked too much, our yard was too untidy, we neglected our dog, etc. etc. One morning, as we were madly trying to get our kids dressed, fed and out the door to catch the school bus, the dog was barking and the phone was ringing and I was ignoring both to focus on the task at hand.

When everything settled down, I checked to see if we had a voice mail message, and there was Mike not only complaining about the dog, but also assuming that we had an answering machine and caller ID (we had neither) and so were deliberately ignoring him and deliberately letting the dog bark just to annoy him. I might add that Mike did not have children, but I bet you guessed that already.

But the nadir of our encounters with Mike came early one spring, after one of those ephemeral wet snowfalls that melt within a day. I don't recall what triggered it, but he stuffed a letter into our mailbox that was one long litany of complaints, including the accusation that we were bad citizens (yes, he used that term) because we didn't shovel our sidewalk. While it was true that we had allowed this most recent snowfall to melt on its own, we had, in fact, been shoveling by hand the 300 feet of sidewalk that wrapped around our large corner lot quite promptly all winter, often before he was out with his snowblower to clear his 40-foot long stretch.

His letter went on at some length about the poor schoolchildren suffering with wet feet because of the puddles they encountered on our sidewalk on their way to school.

In fact, the entire letter was as ridiculous as that, but it caught me at a difficult moment (hormones, children, dealing with a high-maintenence dog, and so forth), that it upset me terribly and my husband made a point of burning it in the fireplace.

I later came to regret that, wishing I had set it aside until my emotions subsided and I could see it for what it really was—comically absurd. If I had it now I would publish it, perhaps with the title The Epistle of a Bitter Neighbor.

Find my Bitter Neighbor journal and other journals from repurposed packaging in the journal section of my Etsy shop.

Because We Just Gotta Have an Afternoon Patio and a Morning Patio

This is the corner of our backyard that used to be Julia's garden, but which was a mess of weeds, raspberries and flowers by the time we bought the house. Little by little, I've been moving the various flowers to different parts of the yard, and some of the raspberries to the kitchen garden near the alley, then digging out the weeds.

That corner also had a small patio, which our neighbors have told us was where Julia's husband, Harry, used to like to sit. Apparently Julia didn't really use it after Harry died. That patio was too small and too sunny in the afternoon for us, so we took those blocks, plus some other materials salvaged from elsewhere in the yard, to make a patio on the east side of the house, which gets shade by three in the afternoon.

But that patio is too bright and sometimes too hot in the morning, when it would be lovely to take tea and the newspaper outside, so we decided we needed a second, morning patio, and realized that the best spot for that was on the west side of the garage—Harry's old patio spot. We figured that a second patio would also allow space for a fire bowl, which doesn't really fit on the first patio because we have a dining table and chairs there. The whole backyard is shady by about 6:30 in the evening, so either spot is pleasant in the evening.

But since it's Sunday and we both want to have a leisurely breakfast and read the paper for a bit before beginning any ambitious projects, by the time we started working on this shady-in-the-morning patio, it was in full sun.

So this is how my husband relaxes on his day off.

After leveling the soil and spreading 15 bags of sand, Craig placed a big honkin' heavy square hunk of cement, which had been sitting by the alley, at a strategic point, which will be where the fire bowl sits.

Then I say, Hey, how about edging that with some bricks? Because I'm full of good ideas like that.

The bricks are a mismatch of some we found here and there in the yard and a few our neighbor was discarding, including this one stamped Purington Paver, which looks kinda like an artifact to me, so I make sure to place it so the inscription will show. (The little square gap will be filled with pebbles or a small plant, I haven't decided yet.)

Over the past couple of weeks, Craig has carted about three dozen or so rectangular patio blocks from the house of a friend who didn't want them anymore; we also collected a few discarded blocks from our neighbor. So we started arranging them in a sort of herringbone pattern. (Yes: "we"; I did help, I'm just not in any of the pictures because I was taking them.) Then, at this point, I say, I think it all needs to be moved about a foot or so to the left. Because I'm helpful that way.

It's just that we needed a little more space between the fire bowl and the chairs; and it did soon occur to us that we could just move the big square far enough over to insert another row of the rectangles, rather than move all of them.

It's about four in the afternoon when Craig puts the finishing touches on the new patio, and sits down to take a little break.

But as it's still sunny there, he soon came over to the "old" patio (constructed two years ago) to join me in the shade. Tomorrow morning he'll head off to work and I'll be in charge of trying out the "morning" patio. It's another way in which I'm helpful.

Wrenifications

The wren first appeared in our backyard a couple of weeks ago, announcing his presence with what the Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes as a “rush-and-jumble song.” I was delighted to see him checking out the small bird house near the patio, then became alarmed when he headed over to the slightly larger one by the kitchen garden, because I thought the chickadees were still using it.

Wrens are known to be real estate hogs, stuffing many houses with twigs to form “dummy nests” so that other birds can’t use them; they sometimes go even further than that and actively eliminate the competiton. According to Cornell, wrens are sometimes the main reason for nest failure of bluebirds and chickadees, as well as some other species, which is why many birders don’t like them. So I was worried that the little fellow was going to do harm to the chickadee chicks.

I scurried over to shoo him away, saying, “You get away from there! That’s the chickadee house! You use the other house!”

“You’re talking to a bird,” said my husband from his seat on the patio.

The wren scuttled onto a perch in our neighbor Sue’s lilac bush, and I noticed that she had a bird house next to her garage also. Aha!  No wonder our yard is a magnet for the little speculator.

I didn’t hear any peeps coming from the chickadee house, so I decided to inspect it to see if the chicks were okay (a well-designed bird house will be easy to open so you can keep an eye on its inhabitants). What I found was a clearly abandoned nest. I then remembered seeing chickadees in the lilacs about a week ago, fluttering their wings like fledglings, but as they looked identical to the adults (not scruffy like robins) and I did not see them on the ground, I hadn’t put two and two together.

So I apologized to the wren, and he was soon happily stuffing twigs into both of our bird houses and, I suspect, Sue’s as well.

“In spring, the male establishes a small breeding territory by singing from exposed perches and putting stick foundations in prospective nest holes,” wrote Donald and Lillian Stokes in their Field Guide to Birds.

After several days of this, there was suddenly a noticeable absense of the wren’s musical bravado in the morning. Had his mate selected some other house down the block? If so, I was indeed sorry. They may be bad birds, but they’re voracious insectivores, and as a gardener first and bird watcher by extension, I would dearly love to have a family of wrens on pest patrol in my garden.

Then one morning I heard not only his by-now familiar burbling call, but a whole lot of chittering. I looked out the window to see two wrens engaged in a lively discussion as one perched on a nearby branch while the other went in and out of each of the houses.

It was fun to see this “songful tour of inspection,” as described by Christopher Leahy in The Birdwatcher’s Companion, after which the female chooses a nest and finishes it. And she’s a clever bird in setting up housekeeping, for she is known to stash a few spider egg sacs in the nest so that the spiders will devour any parasites that may infest the chicks, say the folks at Cornell.

I’m having a hard time telling which house she chose, as they appear to be dallying about both houses still. They are very active little birds, and the sexes look alike, so I find myself wondering if there is, indeed, only one female. According to Leahy, the name wren, which comes from the Anglo Saxons, has a traditional second meaning of one who is lascivious, possibly because of the polygamy of male wrens.

Another Harvest of Little Blue Flowers, as Henry Hudson Looks On

I'm happy to announce that summer has finally arrived in Minneapolis. A friend recently posted on Facebook an overheard comment that pretty much sums it up for all of us: "Looks like summer finally got the memo."

Although the patio, on the east side of the house, is a little too sunny in the morning, there is a little period from about 9:30 to 10 or so when the huge maple tree across the alley casts a bit of dappled shade just where we need it, so we took our tea and the Sunday paper out to sit on the patio for a bit.

The Henry Hudson rose that we planted next to the patio last summer seems quite happy with its morning sun, though.

Once the patio was back in full sun again, we took advantage of the brief morning shade in one of the sunniest parts of our yard, just west of the garage, to do a little digging and transplanting. It's the previous owner's former perennial garden, which had become a raspberry thicket by the time we bought the house, so we've been having at it from time to time, replanting some of the raspberries to a different spot and discovering what else has been growing there under the thorny canes, besides dandelions and tall lawn grasses, that is.

Among the gems hidden amongst the raspberries was this dictamnus (aka gas plant) that I transplanted a couple of weeks ago. As you can see, it has taken happily to its new home.

Craig digs, I transplant. We have to do this side by side because Craig will go at the job with abandon if I'm not there to say, "Stop! Those are daffodils! And those are grape hyacinths!" (To be fair, the strappy leaves do look a lot like grass by this time.) So, dig and replant was the theme of the morning. I've been trying to do most of my transplanting during the week when he's at work, but last week I was too busy with other things and he was anxious to get on with the job of clearing this area out so we can replant it in some sort of orderly fashion.

There are some pretty blue flowers that I forget the name of (I figured it out last summer, but I'm not sure where I wrote it down; some sort of verbena or vervain, I think). I transplanted a few clumps, but much of it is overgrown, falling open at the center, and the lower leaves are looking spotted and unhealthy, so I am only transplanting the separate stands here and there that are smaller and healthier. However, I hate to throw the pretty blue flowers in the compost, so I harvested nearly all the stems from the big clump and brought them inside for a bouquet.

I also hated to toss the confetti of little flowers that fell on the counter top while I was trimming the stems, so I gathered them into a small bowl and placed it on the table to be ready to catch some of the others that fall. It's not the best florists' flower, for all of its flower-shedding tendencies, but I sure like that riot of little blue blossoms.

Transplanting and bouquet gathering

One portion of the fernleaf peony in its new home.

The rules for digging up and transplanting or dividing perennials are pretty simple: do it when they are first emerging, unless they normally flower early in the season, and then it's best to wait until late summer, long after they're done flowering. Or something like that.

But what if it's raining every day and you are still dealing with a big messy weedy patch where a garden used to be, and you really want to transplant all the good stuff as early in the summer as you can so you can clear the rest of it out and get on with doing something else with that corner of your landscape?

Well, then you just muddle along as best you can.

I once asked a Master Gardener if I could get away with transplanting a perennial in the middle of summer, during hot weather. She said, "Yes, if it doesn't realize you're moving it." Gardeners often speak of plants as if they were sentient beings, so I had no trouble understanding what she meant: dig it up in one big clump without disturbing the roots.

This is more easily done with some plants than with others. So when I tried to dig up the fernleaf peony (Paeonia tenuifolia), even as it had flower buds forming, I was dismayed when the roots fell apart as I attempted to lift it from the ground. It was an old peony and was due to be divided anyway, but late May is not the time to divide peonies!

So I performed a little triage, removing all the stems that had flower buds on them and bringing them indoors to put them in a vase, then transplanting about half the plant. I'll transplant the other half too, once I decide where I want to put it. I'm sure I won't see any more flowers on this plant this year, but it will have plenty of time to adjust to its new home and should bloom happily next spring.

The newly transplanted dictamnus, next to a successfully relocated lily.

The other plant on the verge of flowering that I dug up, with more success, was the dictamnus, or gas plant (Dictamnus albus). After the experience with the peony, I tried a different approach. First I sharpened my spade with a file, then I shoved the spade into the ground all around the plant before attempting to lift it, and as a result I got a pretty intact root clump, dirt and all. It helps that the ground has plenty of moisture in it from all the rain we've been getting.

I was careful to plant it at exactly the same depth as before, but with a hole that was a bit wider than the root ball, then filling in around it with little or no disturbance to the roots. Still, there were a few stray stems, so I cut those off and brought them in to add to the bouquet. I also moved a lily, but that won't bloom until late July or August, so it isn't showing any sign of forming buds yet.

Finally, I took some flowers from the mountain bluet (Centaurea montana), because I plan to move that one soon as well. And a little blue in the bouquet seemed like just the right complement for those dark red buds from the other two flowers.

It remains to be seen if the dictamnus will proceed to blossom as normal. If the flowers show no sign of opening after a reasonable period of time, I will have to cut it all back a bit so the failed buds don't deplete the plant's energy.

My bouquet of mostly closed flower buds is not particularly showy, but I enjoy the understated mix of foliage dotted with blossoms (that is one of the perks of having a fernleaf peony -- the great foliage). And I'm a couple of steps closer to taming the backyard, which is actually worth the sacrifice of a few flowers here and there. Like a good bouquet, a pleasing landscape is more about the composition than about the individual elements contained within it.

A Walk Below the Falls on a Spring Morning

It was just a few days ago that the nights here were so balmy that we left the windows open all night for the first time this year. I awoke early Tuesday morning, feeling the humidity in the air, hearing the birds, sensing the sunlight peaking under the partially raised shade of our east window. When it became clear to me that I wasn't going back to sleep, I decided to get up. It was about 6:30.

Up early on a spring morning, I decided to go for a walk. (And not knowing that soon the wintry chill would return yet again—I awoke this morning to see snow on the green grass. Yes, on May 3rd.)

We live just a half mile from Minnehaha Falls, so I walked down to admire the waterfall's abundance fed by the melt down of all the snow we got in April (more than in January!). 

I descended the many stone steps to the creek below the falls, which leads to the Mississippi River.

Spring is getting a late start around here this year, so there's not much color yet other than the stems of the red-twigged dogwood (seen on the left above).

But as I continued along the path and then the boardwalk, I saw a welcome smattering of green. Much of the ground surrounding the creek here is marshlike, and so there is a boardwalk to allow visitors to keep their feet dry and not disturb the soft soil, where bog plants like this skunk cabbage thrive.

I don't recall ever seeing skunk cabbage in bloom, so this siting was a real treat.

This stand of bloodroot in bloom was also a pleasant surprise.

I was alone for most of the time, except for the songbirds and this small hawk; we have two species of small hawks here in the city, Cooper's and sharp shinned, but I didn't see this one well enough to tell which it was. It was keeping a good watch on me, though. 

When I reached the end of the boardwalk, the trail up ahead was muddy and rutted, so I decided it was time to head back home. I did cross paths on my way back with a young couple out for a morning stroll, he with a cup of coffee in hand. Other than those two and me, there was nobody down by the lower creek on this warm spring morning, and no sound other than the creek and the birds.

I walked home from the park a couple of blocks on city sidewalks, waiting for a gap in the morning traffic before crossing 46th Street, up another half block, and in through my front door to make breakfast and tea. I'd been gone an hour but had only walked a couple of miles in that time. Yet it seemed as though I had been so much farther away.