History

We’ll be starting out early tomorrow, traveling the Great River Road along the Mississippi from the Twin Cities to Galena, Illinois.  The occasion is the 80th birthday of my mother’s twin siblings, my Uncle Bob and my Aunt Mary.  You know you’re getting older, as my cousin said last year, when a family reunion sounds [...]

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The definition of loyalty is getting a workout these days.  We’ve been talking about it frequently as the hearings on the auto industry bailout take place. The disconnect is so troubling.  The executive level appears to finally have had a long overdue reality check, yet it’s the rank and file who will be drastically effected [...]

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Michael Lewis, whose work we referenced in our recent post, “Tenacity,” is at it again.  When I read Liar’s Poker in the late 80’s, I was amazed.  I had heard similar vernacular for years around our table at dinner parties populated by equity traders and institutional salespeople.  Lewis is an extremely talented writer who spent [...]

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IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To [...]

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“I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.” – Douglas Adams
When I was growing up in small-town Michigan, our family often took a “Sunday drive.”  Many times we ended up out in the country, traveling any number of meandering back roads, taking in the [...]

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One of the captivating place names we pass through on every return trip from the cabin in Northern Minnesota is Hole-In-The-Day.  There’s a street that runs parallel along Highway 371 in Nisswa, and a bay in Gull Lake by the same name.  During the long drive, I’ve often daydreamed about what was behind the name, [...]

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I can barely write this post for emotion.  Today, I will go and vote.  My husband and I will go together.  Our polling place is a short walk down a tree-lined street from our home.  When I lived in Deephaven, it was another peaceful walk to an orderly polling place in a well-kept school.  For [...]

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At the end of October and into November, Midwestern sunlight turns thin.  There is less of it, and it stretches to fill the hours in a milky wash that fades everything in sepia and gold.  It is on such a day that we visit the farm.
On a lovely hilltop, set back from the road and [...]

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I spent the weekend with friends near Kensington, Minnesota, about 2-1/2 hours northwest of the Twin Cities.  In 1897, a great slab of stone with carved inscriptions, the Kensington Runestone, was discovered entwined within a tree’s root structure by a farmer clearing his field down the road from where we visited.
Runes are letters in Germanic [...]

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