Green

I love this time of year. Just in the past two days the ground went from dingy brown to bursts of green grass. The trees are starting to bud out and it all feels very hopeful. Last year I hated Spring, because it felt like a mockery of our loss from the previous Spring. But this year it feels better.

Yesterday I was out walking Cocoa and it was a little breezy but very warm, and I just stood on the trail by the river and gazed out over the water and felt the wind on my face. It was one of the many moments I was glad to be living in Minnesota. How can you beat walking along the Mighty Mississippi on a daily basis?

Have you ever noticed the road maps that your mind creates in dreams? When I dream of a particular place I used to live, there are only a few certain roads that exist in great detail, and then it's like the old maps that say "Beyond Here Be Dragons" cuz it's all unknown territory. I dream about Tuscon like that. I remember the bus route I took to the U and the northwest part of town in the foothills where there used to be this great independent bookstore called The Haunted Bookshop. Figures, a bookworm like me would dream about bookstores.

Over the weekend we went to the Bell Museum of Natural History and saw live bugs that live in Minnesota waters. The guy with the bugs was picking them up and said we could pick them up, too, and J. was like "I'll never go in the water again." They did look rather nasty. But there was one that was so amazing and weird, it had what looked like wings but they were actually gills, so when the critter breathed it looked very graceful. And it also looked sort of dragon-like, like the long kind you see in Chinese New Year parades (as opposed to the Western dragons slayed by knights). They also had a really amazing b&w photography exhibit by this fly-fisher. I don't fish but these were amazing photographs. If you go to the website link above you'll see one of his photos on the homepage.

I also went to a new Altered Book Group just starting up in St. Paul and had oodles of fun sitting around gabbing about art and looking at some gorgeous altered books. We kind of took over the middle of this coffee shop, and at one point this young woman (oh boy I must be getting old, she was 24 and seemed like a teenager to me) came over and asked if we were in a class or something. There was also this big lumberjack-looking guy sitting at a table by himself near us, and he seemed to be rolling his eyes at us, but I just chose to ignore him. One woman brought a whole tub of books she'd worked on over the years and it was such a treat to handle them all and talk about them. Most of the people I've met since I got into this art form have just been soooo generous, it's really nice.