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 tell it before its too late.
We get caught up in the
immediate in the headlong rush of our lives, and don't think to ask the
elders about theirs, thinking or not thinking that they'll always be
there until they're not; then later by chance or design, learn something
about them that was unknown, then painfully realize their woeful
failure to ask them when they had the opportunity.
Storm clouds entering Roseau County on June 10, 2002 preceding the county-wide flood of June 11. On January 14, 2026, I found the above image buried away in a file cabinet. I had completely forgotten it and even now as I reexamine it wonder where I was when I took it. As old images often do, they can enable one to remember at least what we think happened, (before AI & Photoshop, etc) as photographic fact. And whereas, I can't recall the immediate hours following this image, I can recall to some degree of accuracy, how the flood affected me personally some of the days because I took many many pictures and published a good number of them in our magazine, THE RAVEN: Northwest Minnesota's Original Art, History, & Humor Journal, 1994-2018. The flood issue being Volume 7 Issue 1A. Unknown to me at the time, if but briefly before Joe McDonnell called me to meet them in Wannaska to help sandbag around the church, threatened as it was by flood wate...
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