WannaskaWriter

    An old Liberty trailer house began a new life as a family deer camp.     In 1993, after moving our house in from Humboldt, up towards St. Vincent in Kittson County, I sold my trailer home to a family member who wanted it as a family deer camp. It was only four miles away, so we were able to visit it and relive its past glories over the next probably 20 years. By that time, it didn't smell too bad.     During its previous days as a semi-vacant tin-covered box, it had served as my artist 'loft' three feet off the ground where, often an easel or two with an unfinished canvas stood in its north light and the odor of oil paint and wet canvas and brushes over-shadowed any unacceptable fragrances.     It had been a 24/7 writer's nook where I had written thousands of pages of wild random thought, often in alcohol-induced euphoria--and darkness--and where, in the mid-1980s, thanks to my wife, Jackie Helms, my poetry began to blossom.    It had also later served

  On the night of June 18, 2024 Mikinaak Creek received between 3 and 4 inches of rain. We slept through it. Then at daybreak awoke to the   MIKINAAKIPPI   It’d be great if we could hold water this big all year long. But this isn’t as high as it got in 2002, for there’d be no grass showing at all in that case. I have a high water mark up by the house.  The bird feeder post marks the 2002 high water mark Still, it's nice to be able to load the jon boat in the truck ... drive the truck up our road Unload the boat, drag it down the steep wooded bank to the water's edge and push off for a quick but wonderfully pleasant ride back home. Life is good.

  A portion of the White Spruce trees we planted in 1974.    Fifty years ago this month, with the help of a friend, I started hand-planting trees in a fifteen acre poplar woods in Roseau County bordered on the west by Mikinaak Creek (the Ojibwe spelling for snapping turtle and not what is written in English on the maps), and a neighbor’s fenced quarter section on its east, where just the summer before, the farmer had bulldozed all the trees and windrowed their debris like a hay field prior to baling.  I was thunderstruck by their destruction, for that dense woodland lent the creek bottom and my quaint homestead the beauty and privacy I desired, having lived in a city all my life to that point. Its horrific loss underscored to me that I could do nothing about what my neighbors did on their land, and if I wanted such an environment, I would have to plant it myself. And so I have with the help of family and friends, as planting trees became the best decision I have ever made concerning th

Yesterday I awoke with this very same idea being as my wife and I live here 'in the middle of nowhere' away from all the rest of our immediate family; the threat of contacting and spreading Covid, a further isolating experience, making things terribly worse especially during holiday periods and birthdays. The wife stays in contact with our children, and grandchildren via Facebook/FaceTime, etc; occasional texts, and emails but, the way I see it, most of it is small talk with little substantive exchange of information, something I lament because their aging mother's/grandmother's, once-illustrative life is little known among them. I foresee regret on their parts for not asking her about herself NOW; born in 1944, what was her childhood like?; who were her her parents? Her siblings? What did she think of as a young girl. Where did she go to school? What was it like to raise four children all under the age of five? Learn the story of her life as only she can