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You’ve heard the story. Marsha gives me a gift certificate for Bender’s in Grand Rapids every birthday and every Christmas. So, if I miss coming home a year (four certificates!) there’s a shoe binge on the horizon and Bender’s has great shoes, kind of like a mini-Dillards. Travel is a indeed enlightening, enriching, good for one’s soul…sole…whatever. Insomnia not quite gone yet…but leaving. Up to Roseau on the border tomorrow for cousin… Read More
This was intended to be a meaningful post about the importance of home and how fortunate some of us are to return often and to celebrate safety, heritage, family, memories. I wanted to say something about the millions in the world who can never go home again…the refugees…I always think about them when I’m here. It’s late now though and there’s only time left in this day to thank Dr. Minnesota for… Read More
Remember , earlier in this ‘year of ageing dangerously,’ I outlined a series of ‘mostly’ small journeys, each with its own peculiar personal meaning. Well, Trip #2 is about to commence. While the first of this 2019 travel series was the California Black Mountain birthday climb fueled by a promise of borscht and cucumber vodka at the end, this trip is all about Home/Real Home/Me and the Real Home. The old nourish-the-inner-child… Read More
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. (T.S. Eliot/The Waste Land) Before leaving, with some measure of relief, my birth month in this watershed year (the month and year I got old…) of 2019, I must speak to Eliot’s April meditations—which… Read More
There was that most pleasurable rainy ride from Stavanger shared in all of those raindrop photos—leading up to the best possible time in Kristiansand. My family here includes Tone, Simon, Oda and Erland. Tone is the daughter of my second-cousin, Gurine, whom I first met in 1985. I liked her so much; she and I agreed back then that if only we lived closer to each other we would become such good… Read More
THE ‘BEGATS’ According to cousin, Arne Neset, of Stavanger, Norway, Neset history begins in the late 17th century when one of our ancestors, Knut J. Haugen, appears to have bought the farm Haugen from the bailiff Christian Mouritzen Torup in Grendi around 1695. Thanks to Arne’s fairly extensive research here’s what we know. First a ‘begat’ paragraph to bring the family up to the 1860s. For five generations, the family name was… Read More
This is the first section of a story I wrote awhile ago about Grandma Asborg Neset. When I knew Grandma Neset she was old and stooped with a deeply wrinkled face. She did not like children and usually referred to me as dårlig jente (bad girl) although I was the person she asked to read the funny papers to her on Sundays; Dick Tracy was her favorite. Her house always… Read More
Minnesota…to Vietnam Minnesota is fading quickly into the background as I immerse myself in preparing for Asia. Oh yeah and then there’s also work—long hours because of evenings managing the theatre for renters; preparing my apartment for a stay by the bro and Marsha while they search for their Albuquerque winter apartment, and the minutia of daily life such as putting gas in the car and doing the laundry and watering the… Read More
My River Runs To Thee My River runs to thee— Blue Sea! Wilt welcome me? My River wait reply— Oh Sea—look graciously— I’ll fetch thee Brooks From spotted nooks— Say—Sea—Take Me! (Emily Dickinson) Beautiful morning along the Mississippi. *** On a pond of Mississippi backwater in Robert’s Green Hornet.
Fall, leaves, fall Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree. I shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow; I shall sing when night’s decay Ushers in a drearier day. (Emily Bronte) I come home almost every summer, stay at Robert and Marsha’s in Grand Rapids, and walk in the woods along the… Read More