Thursday, August 28, 2014
Eventful Decorah
Summer is generally so
beautiful in Minnesota it’s hard to leave even to take a vacation.
Now as we
come to the end of August we pat ourselves on the backs for doing so.
Two days gone
guarantees a small trip. It was a perfect length of time and we played it
leisurely. We dipped just below the state line to visit Decorah, Iowa.
We’ve driven
past Decorah heading north many times. We’re coming from St. Louis or other
points south and we don’t stop.
We’re closing
in on the Minnesota border with its promise of home in a few more
hours. We keep promising we'll come back some day and see the town
properly.
Luther College, a private liberal arts college
located there, is one of the reasons Decorah has been attracting interest.
With a
beautiful campus, and an academic program to be proud of, it's the strong music
tradition and excellence of its many music groups that come to mind when I
think of the school.
A musically
talented young woman we know chose this school as a match for her gift of a
voice and this is how we came to hear of Luther College.
Then there’s
the small matter of Decorah’s Norwegian heritage. The city is proud of its
Nordic connections via its early population of Scandinavian immigrants from
which it developed and grew.
You start out
to see one thing, as we did with Decorah, and the nature of travel is that
extras are generously thrown in.
These bonuses
can be as special or as appreciated as what you set out to enjoy.
One such place
turned out to be a gem of a discovery. This was Spring Grove, Minnesota.
From the map
it lay just off our route. Spring Grove struck me as a refreshing name. I
suggested we detour the few miles to check it out.
A sign at the
entrance to town informs that Spring Grove is the first Norwegian settlement in
Minnesota.
It's a pretty
little town set in green hills. The original families could have believed they
were back in Norway with the verdant hills and steep valleys. All that was
missing to make it Norway were the fjords.
The quarter
Norwegian in me was happy to touch base with this original setting of Norwegian
relocation to Minnesota.
Norwegians
from the Old Country dispersed through the state in the years that followed the
settlement of Spring Grove.
Leaving all
behind, it took brave hearts. Those who settled Spring Grove, then a
wilderness, and who preceded the rest of their countrymen, were role models for
the rest.
Burr
Oak is an Iowa hop and skip over the Minnesota border. It’s sits
barely off Hwy 52. Burr Oak was another serendipitous find. As a Laura
Ingalls Wilder fan it was like finding a lost chapter of her life.
Laura
Ingalls and her family lived in Burr Oak about a year when she was a small
girl.
The
Ingalls family moved from Minnesota when friends from their former home in
Walnut Grove bought a hotel and then asked Laura’s father to manage it.
I
don’t believe the Iowa year is chronicled in The Little House in the Woods
series, which is why coming upon Burr Oak was a surprise. (We must have missed
the signs other trips.)
Masters
Hotel, now the site of Laura Ingalls Wilder Park and Museum, and where Pa in
1876 took the position as manager, has a white painted exterior and is pristine
with orange daylilies growing alongside.
Our
Iowa getaway was unplanned even to motel arrangements – perhaps not the
smartest thinking during busy vacation season.
We
came into Decorah the day after Nordic Fest 2014. We missed all the activities
associated with the annual event.
Bad timing to
miss Nordic Fest you say. Fifty-fifty bad luck, or equally good luck, is more
like it.
Yes, we missed
the event and it’d have been a blast (a reason to return next year).
However, without
motel reservations made, if we arrived while Nordic Fest was going on, we
probably wouldn’t have scored a room.
Coming when we
did, we had an available room and a room at Country Inn and Suites that faces a
quiet hill. The place serves cookies, warming Al's heart.
Country Inn and
Suites is located on the Trout Run Trail (the trail is practically right out
the door).
Trout Run Trail
is part of a trail system Decorah has developed and recently extended. The
trail, we were told, is an 11 mile loop, and learned that eagles nest where
hikers can view them.
With the weather
sunny and pleasant – actually a tad cool for this time of year - we made the most
of the time by using it outdoors on the trails.
Along
with the trails we enjoyed Dunning’s Springs. It occupies a shady glen, has a
neat overhead walkway, is worth a camera shot or two and comes with some
history besides.
Later
we found a little prairie park with wildflowers. Rocks are placed
strategically. I parked myself while Al photographed flowers and butterflies
and enjoyed the mild warmth on me from the lowering sun.
The
big hill next to our motel was bright with firefly light when dusk turned to
night. Hundreds of miniature lights wove luminous trails in a ever changing
pattern against the hill as it disappeared into deep shadow.
The
firefly show was quite magical, as was the vacation in its brief
entirety. It was a pleasant chance to drive not too far, and to enjoy
something quite nearby.
Ro
Giencke – August 28, 2014
Saturday, August 23, 2014
Loud is the new silent
Noise is with us wherever we are.
There’s no avoiding it. As a presence it travels
with us and is there before we arrive.
Stop for gas and you almost don’t want to get out to pump it.
Music
at gas stations is often very loud. It blasts you as you fill your tank.
Conversations at restaurants must compete with the music being played.
Words get swallowed up by the impossible decibel levels allowed by some
restaurants.
We and other couples we know have walked out of restaurants because
they’re too loud.
We don’t elect to spend our dinners shouting at our servers to be
heard. From experience (trust me on this) the noise prevents any actual
visiting from taking place.
A number of us are scratching our heads at indoor malls. We wonder
if we wandered into a disco by accident.
The hard-hitting volume to the music reaches the farthest corridors. The
high decibels might work in a nightclub. It seems overdone for the shopper
crowd.
Don’t
get me (or a bunch of us) started on the hand dryers installed in many public
restrooms and at Interstate rest stops.
Multiple
hand dryers with several in use at once are like an echo chamber of
horrors.
They're
so hurtfully loud that tots have been seen to cry when they come on.
It startles them. Sensitive ears among them are particularly shaken.
It
doesn’t seem right that little kids, still somewhat protected from the assault
of noise, should have to stand under these loud dryers every time they use a
public washroom.
Leaf blowers are the bane of residential areas. Their disquieting din
drills into the neighborhood quiet.
They grind away, from one yard to the next, blowing a few leaves off the
driveways. Their stink and unwelcome volume of noise drifts through opened
windows.
On our table the meal may be on but when leaf blowers are whining nearby
it strikes me that what we're being served is polluted air.
It makes me wonder if anyone brooms away leaves anymore. A broom is
exercise, is low cost (and low maintenance), gets the same results as a leaf
blower and doesn’t foul the air or break your eardrums.
If you can’t use a broom for leaf removal from your sidewalk or driveway
will someone please invent a silencer for residential leaf blowers. I plead!
Constant extraneous noise, whether from music or equipment used every
day, can't be good thing.
This certainly is true in regard to our young. With a lifetime of
hearing ahead of them, universal loud noise is doing some of its greatest harm
to this generation.
Young people work and study to loud noise for hours at a time. They
listen to it at decibels that make my ears ache.
Many teens are accustomed to music being loud. They’re talking as loud
as their grandparents to compensate.
They sound like my grandpa who had to ask us to repeat what we said. He
was deaf at an early age (not from loud music). It isn't fun to lose you
hearing he'd tell them.
My generation took it on the ears too. We had our rock concerts. We were
not without our own addiction to loud music.
We’re paying the price years later in wholesale hearing loss. But our
ears took breaks in between. It wasn’t a continuous thing except for the rock
stars.
Those in positions that decide the decibel in places we shop, eat out
and go to relax can’t be unaware of the "too loud too long" effect on
humans.
Loud steady noise impacts employees and the rest of us. What it may do
in the long term we can only imagine now.
Reduced exposure to noise, and a responsible decision on the part of
businesses to sensibly monitor decibels where people congregate, are sound
steps towards protecting our hearing as individuals and as a society.
Each of us must decide how willing we are to put our hearing on the
line.
Some of us are pushing back against excessive decibels. Our method is
simple and works. We measure decibels onsite with a smartphone app.
When we think a place is too loud, and the noise potentially injurious
to the health of our ears, we employ the app. It has helped us decide a few
times whether we stay or move on.
It seems fair that businesses which interface with the public advise us
up front about the decibel levels they keep.
Decibel information can be posted on their front doors. It’d be like the
signs that ban guns on the premises or the No Smoking notices we see everywhere.
This information would also be handy on web sites. We can check to
see if (besides Tuesday specials and weekend hours) we want to go at all. The
music (as posted by decibels) may be too loud for our tastes.
Loud
has worked its way into almost everything. It’s taken for granted. It’s maybe
time to see how some of this can change. It’s time to reflect on how sound has
grown.
We’ve
come a long way from the sound experience of my generation. If you were country
raised or from a small town (both boxes checked for me) this applies all the
more.
When
I grew up, as a summer country resident, and in town from September through
May, sounds were in the background more than they are now.
The
wail of fire trucks, ambulances or police cars was pretty much absent. I
wasn't able to differentiate one siren from another when we did hear them. All
caught our attention as sirens are meant to do.
Our
town did have a couple means of keeping the community informed through the use
of public sirens.
There
was a noon whistle (whistle, not siren, as I recall) and a 9:30 pm curfew
siren. The noonday whistle meant lunchtime. Curfew at night called kids still
outside in from the dark.
When
it comes to remembering sounds I wonder if it’s possible we’re not as
emotionally attached to childhood sounds as to associations that come with
other of our senses.
Cinnamon
rolls fresh from the oven, for instance, remind us of the good aromas from the
kitchens of our youth. It takes just one whiff to be transported back to five
and eight and ten years of age.
Specific
smells evoke the past. They can make us nostalgic. Smell, an agent of
connection, makes us appreciate its influence on us. Smell taps something deep
inside. Smell has a raft of associations.
Sounds
heard as we grow up are perhaps stored on a memory disc apart from the rest. Or
maybe sounds are so integral to the events that it takes some work to find them
and sort them out.
Outdoor
sounds, not indoor sounds, are what I remember. Except for school, and winter’s
indoor hours, outdoors is where we spent our time.
It’s
great exercise to meditate on sounds remembered from long ago. The sounds we
wind up recalling can be as healing and connecting as smell associations or old
photos we look at that put us back into the scene.
The
process of recalling sounds started out slow when I tried it. One or two
remembered sounds floated upward easily. They in turn delivered others.
It’s
as if each nudges the one next to it and says Hey, you’re part of this too.
The
haunting cry of loons is at the top of remembered sounds. Elusive and shy of
humans as they were then, we were proud that we had a family of loons (the
Minnesota state bird) nesting on our lake.
Birds
and waterfowl, gathering in flocks in the late summer, and treating our area as
a layover on their seasonal migration, come to mind.
I
can hear the twitters among the birds, heavy by count on the telephone lines by
the river, with its morning fog as the days cooled, and the sharper calls of
migratory Canadian geese.
Frogs
croaking in the spring, the lazy drone of honeybees in our garden and the
chorus of cicadas in the backyard add to the repertoire of sounds.
Summer
rain created a range of sounds. There were the gentle ploop-ploop sounds of
raindrops on water if it began to sprinkle when we swam or were in the
boat.
Summer
rains were sometimes not much more than medium drizzle and if we got caught out
in it we didn't mind getting a bit wet.
There
was the tattoo of steady rain on the porch roof and the barrage of rain against
the window panes in the fury of a thunderstorm.
The
sizzle of summertime rain on superheated highway is especially recalled. A
tarry smell arose in vapors of steam from the hot wet asphalt. This smell was a
distinctive smell of summer then.
These
were our barefoot days. Our feet knew intimately the burning heat of sun-baked
pavement. Quick steps across the hot road, the pads of our feet like on fire,
is another sound of summer that drifts to me.
A
rural neighbor had a dock for a float plane. The float plane was for occasional
fishing trips up north.
We
didn't have a nearby airport and weren’t under a direct flight path (although
we occasionally saw jet contrails high in the sky). The float plane made us
feel modern. Air space was otherwise the realm of birds.
In
the country we had minimal car traffic. A small number of cars and farm
equipment passed by on any given day.
A
car going by made for some interest. We knew the neighbors’ cars. My brothers
could tell who was going by without looking. They could tell by the sound of
the engine or the speed at which the car was driven.
When
we thought about it we wondered where the farm neighbors might be going. There
weren’t many places to go to then - to some other neighbor’s or into town.
Cars
we couldn’t identify were the tourists, and at the end of the season most of
them were gone.
The
sounds of nature were all around but were often muted. You had to have an alert
ear and be observant.
The
soft thud of an apple off the apple tree in August or September could go
unnoticed as you walked by. It takes being on watch.
This
gets you to notice things to wonder about. It’s a gift that develops when you
spend time in nature.
The
rumble of farm pickups and tractors over the wood planked bridge near our
country home is a sound my ears readily pick up again.
As
kids we swam in the river under the bridge. The bump-bump-bumpity-bump of farm
equipment crossing over was exciting.
It
was like two different worlds going on, which of course is exactly what it
was.
The
farmers (often farm kids were driving the tractors – teenage boys with
sun-bleached hair and strong with well-worked summer muscles) were probably
unaware of us.
From
under the bridge we were hidden from them, and were far removed from the
reality of their working day.
I
still hear (as memory brings it to me) the sounds of our farm neighbor calling
his herd of cows to the barn in the late summer evenings.
Getting
his dairy herd into shelter was a nightly ritual shared with us through the
sound of his voice carried across the river.
It
gave a sense of ineffable peace. It was like nothing could ever change. You
could believe his voice would go on everlastingly into the summer dusk.
The
barking of farm dogs running out to chase our car (and other cars) and the
snapping noises some made as they went for the tires comes to me.
This
memory lies further down in the pack. It didn’t emerge immediately. But it has
shown up and makes me smile as thought is given to it.
A
few dogs in our rural neighborhood were inveterate car chasers.
Some
did it for the love of it. Others were quite mean-spirited. We knew those
places and were glad we were safely inside the car whenever we rode that
particular stretch of road.
It
was the era before boom boxes. Music outdoors was mostly limited to transistor
radios. Transistor owners used earplugs to keep the sounds contained.
Because
of the general quiet surrounding us the sounds I recall are of nature or
they’re communal in nature.
The
sounds are the sounds of our lives. We were at play, at peace with each other
and outside in the fresh good air.
We
never dreamed life would be so much louder than it was then. The sounds of our
youth become a marker by which we measure change.
Ro Giencke –
August 23, 2014
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Fall in line
The big fall fashion
editions of magazines are starting to come out.
We have first looks at
colors and silhouettes we’ll see, and some of us will wear, in the season ahead.
While January is reckoned the start of the New Year those of us with any interest in styles and trends pounce on August and September as our new year (sans capital letters).
These
transition months kick off the new look inaugurated by autumn-winter collections shown on fashion
runways around the world.
Not that we’re tired of summer wear. Not by a long shot. Summer wear means summer.
Dressing lightly is my kind of style for as long as summer
chooses to hang around. I suspect this
thinking prevails pretty much across the board.
Most of us, nevertheless,
are refreshed by a new palette of colors and new textures. It’s within us, I
believe, to be renewed by change, like a coat of paint on the wall, which makes
for instant transformation.
Even should we live in a climate without four seasons (certainly not the case here in the Midwest) there is in many of us a tendency to choose what we put on by the time of year we're in.
While a seasonless wardrobe is the
ideal – staples to wear at any time – the practice of rotating pieces in our closet has
an amazingly comfortable right feel to it.
The fall line, presented
on glossy magazine pages, at online retail venues and perhaps most tempting of
all, via racks of newly shipped merchandise in the stores, makes this an interesting time for your closet.
This season meshes with
back to school shopping. Sales and promos bring in students and their
families as they restock for the school year ahead.
In the stores you marvel at tweaks in style in the fall collections.
Embellishment (or lack of it) change in proportion, wider hemlines, and other details, abruptly make last year’s almost identical pieces appear oh so last season. How do they do that you wonder!
Then there are trends that are imaginative forays into new territory. These clothes may catch on. They may not. They do cause you to stop and consider.
Mostly I consider how far removed we become in time from trends that seem aimed for quick trajectory.
Trends
for the most part are reduced to fads in my increasing loyalty to the tried and
true. It makes it easier to pass by items not needed but are cute / on
sale / or which shout Buy me.
My sister and I,
non-fashionistas from the beginning, nevertheless enjoy the fashion hype that
comes with the fall lineup.
On our last visit she
gave me a clothes catalog she was done with. We swap catalogs and jewelry, just
as we swap clothing from time to time.
The catalog comes from
England. It has luscious pieces. It offers beautiful soft cashmere sweaters
with prices comparable to the cost of an air ticket to London.
Maybe if we teamed up and ordered a sweater and split the time of wearing it between us we could afford a catalog purchase.
That is, if we could agree on a color. It makes the transaction
dubious as we’re drawn to different hues.
From the fall magazines,
and catalogs like the one my sister shared with me, we get an idea of key looks
of the new season.
Investing some time this way you develop the ability to discern where the winds of fashion change are occurring.
You note if a
blouse is tucked in or left out, whether it’s loose billowy pants this year or if
leggings are still in charge.
The details are like a
set of directions. You can follow or refer to them or disregard them entirely. Fashion,
ultimately, is what you make of it.
What these fashion
sources particularly help with is suggesting how pieces from our closets can be
worn to be made to look current.
Unlike young shoppers, and those in the prime of their careers, many of us past those stages buy less for our closets now.
Our closets are established through generally careful purchases and many years of making advantageous buys.
We’ve weeded and refined our closets, adding to them as some piece, with its perfect color or functional value, is put on the hanger next to the rest.
A closet is ongoing maintenance. Without effective management, however, it can take on a life of its own.
As with anything it can grow
out of bounds (think weedy garden). A neglected closet is robbed of its true worth, furthermore
robbing you.
One way to maximize your closet is to utilize each piece for all its worth. In other words, wear what
you have and make it work even better for you.
To do this you pull together
what you already have. You clinch a look with an accessory like a scarf or an
interesting brooch, as a friend does with panache, making brooches her signature look.
You let the way you
dress, or a dominant color you wear, be your style. This is, I think, what
classic dressing means.
Half your life you don’t want to be considered a classic dresser. At least that’s how it was for me.
Classic sounded boring. I took it to mean Chanel, conservative hemlines and discreet
hound's tooth checks. Nothing was farther from me than that.
Classic dressing suits me now and I like it. It’s just how you interpret what classic is.
Classic for me
is casual and I’m fine with that. When you ace what you wear it’s because it
fits who you are. That’s classic defined in the real.
When my sister and I are together next there’s a Pottery Barn catalog for her. She’ll enjoy it.
Neither of us can totally change out our homes or our closets. (Nor would we want to.) But a fresh look can greatly revive us. It can be done quite easily and without great expenditure of time or money.
It takes something as simple as one item introduced, or switching an item around. It's a genius system if you think about it. And your home and closet will thank you.
Ro Giencke – August 13, 2014
Friday, August 8, 2014
Fishing in the slow lane
It’s been a pleasant day of sun and high cloudiness. This has been our weather the past several weeks.
It's been a long string of nice days. We stop and comment to each other about it. “A bunch of beauties,” we nod and say.
It’s starting to be called an exceptional summer. June rains, even with the widespread damage that resulted, contributed hugely to the beauty around us as it turns out.
Wildflowers
and flowers in the simplest of garden settings stand taller than we ever recall due to the
bounty of sun and rain.
Though warm temperatures hold, and the days are falling perfectly one
after the other, like ripe fruit for the picking, we can tell inroads are being
made on the season.
Acorns are falling, there is some slight tingeing to a smattering of
leaves and, most significant of all, the sun creeps off to bed earlier
each evening.
These signs, taken as a whole, remind us that August shares its
beginning letter with autumn and in the end hands summer off to fall.
Another indicator of the time of year is a sign seen on the side of a metro bus the other day.
Maybe you
have to be Minnesotan to know what the sign advertises before you read the
other part of the sign that tells you who is paying for the sign.
"As a Minnesotan attendance is pretty much mandatory" is the message. To those in the know (Minnesota natives and Minnesotans by adaptation or adoption) it can only mean one thing.
It means the Minnesota State Fair. It runs August 21 to Labor Day, September 1 this year.
Along with the chuckle
the sign provided we agreed that mandatory is a good word. Mandatory is pretty
much the only correct word to use in connection with the State Fair.
Obligatory might be a close second if there was a vote. Both words fairly accurately define how seriously we take our State Fair.
Attendance is almost de rigueur at what is arguably Minnesota’s oldest and best annual tradition.
Mix family reunion with party vibes and throw in multiple foods on a stick (for some, the biggest draw). That's a start. Everyone has something that's favorite at the fair which they go back for each year.
In the meantime there’s
plenty of great summer ahead. Some of the best moments are now.
Parks and beaches have
been busy ever since it was dry enough to come out and play. And play is what
we’ve all been doing to the fullest extent.
The enjoyments of summer were brought home by a fishing scene we witnessed at a city park.
Two small
boys, maybe ages five and three, were shore fishing with their dad.
The brothers were fishing
for panfish. They were having phenomenal luck. They cast and the fish repeatedly
took the hook.
The boys were fun to
watch. They were very into fishing. With
each catch their dad released the fish back into the water.
You could tell the dad was liking this quiet time with his sons. They didn’t chatter or fall in or elbow each other out of the way.
They cast and caught fish, always turning to him to help take the newest
fish off the hook.
Before the dad threw the fish back in the water he took a picture of each boy with his fish.
It was time
slowing down in the best sense. The three were lost to the world in the patterns of
casting, catching and companionship.
The younger boy, a natural fisherman by the way he cast, struck a fisherman’s pose when his picture was taken. He held the fish out in front of him and wore his broadest smile.
The camera caught the pride on the boy’s face. In some way the dad also recorded the reflection of his own pride in his two sons.
The pictures are proof that the boys fished. The photos are testament to a
father giving of himself to make his sons happy.
Lots of good summer stuff is going on. We have delightful weather, low humidity, still generous amounts of daylight and nights
that are good sleeping weather. It hardly gets better than this.
August lets you know that, however much you’re in the thick of summer, the season is preparing to wind down. Time takes on an air of appreciation all its own.
Ro Giencke – August 8,
2014
Saturday, August 2, 2014
Painting buddy
Our yard is in continual motion.
Chipmunks dart around shrubbery. Squirrels do their high wire acts on the overhead
lines.
The red squirrel count seems higher than what we judged to be a low cycle a couple years back.
I mentioned to Al that by their numbers the
chippies and squirrels came through the hard winter fine. He said yes, of
course, hibernation is a great asset.
There is also the blur of
wings that we occasionally catch. It’s not only the various birds that nest
around here, but wild ducks have also raised their families on our pond.
The ducks were here this
spring. I thought they moved on. My more watchful husband tells me they’ve been
here all the time.
They fly in low through
the cover of trees to find the patch of water that remains from our heavy June
rains. We see them paddle in their domestic groupings. They apparently regard
us as home territory.
When
cleaning the stair railings out front there was such a stir in the shrubbery. Chipmunks were playing tag in and out of the
bushes. They made quite a commotion.
They’re
spunky little rascals and the property damage they can do is in our experience.
They better play more quietly or stay farther away from the house. They’ve been
advised, let’s say!
Today, an absolutely
fabulous first Saturday of August, I got around to painting our pair of Adirondack
chairs.
The chairs came with the
house and we appreciate them for that. They’re a tie to previous owners who sat in them, as
we have, and like us enjoyed the cool breezes under the trees.
Painting the chairs has
been on the summer to-do list. We consider it fast work to have the painting done
before Labor Day. They do look nice all gleaming again.
The repaint was in white,
the original color. It entered my mind to introduce a new color for the chairs.
We see bright lawn chairs wherever we go. They look playful and contemporary but in the end we didn't try new hues. A fresh coat of paint is a clean pristine touch that best suits the Adirondack chairs, the yard and us.
The white paint was well brushed onto the backs of the chairs when a leaf on the seat of one of the chairs caught my eye.
I bent to brush the leaf
away and realized it was a little tree frog. It was green and cute as a
button.
I went on painting the first chair. The tree frog would be gone when I get to the second chair I figured.
A
smile on my face wasn’t for the excellent brush strokes but for this tiny pal,
newly met, who ruled the wood chair like it was a throne.
The tree frog, when the
paint can was moved over to the second chair for painting, was still there. It held a more advantageous spot. It hunkered in a
crack between the slats in the chair seat.
It was obvious it wasn’t
going to budge. My tree frog was a chair frog and a chair frog it
intended to be.
Cautiously I painted around it. It didn’t bat an eye. It sat quietly all the while.
My painting
buddy was still claiming its chair when I finished the job.
Ro Giencke – August 2,
2014
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