Spring in Minnesota

Change is ugly and new and born again ...

We decided to come back here

in the ugliest time of year.

All was brown and wet and cold

and damp - not crisp as in autumn

But moldy, like a gas station deli sandwich

You left in your car door, half-eaten

In the backyard fecundity

A wasteland once gardened

Plants strewn around a stone path

Eroded into the ground

The homeowners ended their marriage

The kids went between houses

But the rabbits kept happily reproducing

Bouncing around the yard all together

Rabbit Family Reunion

It was their domain

Today it has been 6 years

6 years!

A Kindergartener

Pandemic

Life and death

A family home

Trees cut down with cranes and axes

Trees planted and staked to stand straight in the wind

Their bark munched all winter

By the rabbits and squirrels

With whom we share this land

This hard land

This good land

This American land

Not ours

Not yours

The world’s

The brown thick sandy dirt

Once underwater

Then a medical waste dump

Then postwar construction

Mid-Century modern

Torn down burned down still standing

The dirt is thawing and coming alive again

In the ugly thick heavy snow

Mottled with animal urine and car tracks and smushed leaves

I see a worm

I wrote this poem in March 2023 after living in our Minneapolis home for almost six years. We first saw this home in March of 2017 on a visit from California. The homeowners were a young couple with kids who had recently gone through a divorce. The home was built in the ‘50s and had experienced multiple fires and many owners, including one who built an intricate garden that had not been maintained. But as these things go, this was the one house in the neighborhood we could really afford. Now, it has become our family home. I know still it is not “ours,” but we share it with the world and all creation, including lots of rabbits and squirrels. And every “ugly” Minnesota spring, I’m reminded of how new life begins sometimes in unexpected or unsightly ways.

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