The two country mice left their home on a cool sunny Sunday and drove north to the border. Teresa told the border guard we were going to Winnipeg for a Mozart concert and the guard said, "Why didn't I know about this?" He was a Mozart fan and had just been in Austria. We chatted a few minutes until a car pulled up behind us. We promised to tell him about the concert the next time we saw him. We drove northwest through the aspen woodlands and by the dull brown fields, past the onion domed Orthodox churches and the churches of the Mennonites, cousins of the Amish without the buggies. Through Grunthal and Sainte Agathe, over the Red River where water from the Roseau River flows too. And finally past the Daliesque football stadium and onto the campus of the University of Manitoba. Parking was free on weekends and we walked to the concert hall along streets still gritty from a long winter on the edge of the prairie. The river is only a couple of hundred...
Picture of the northern lights over the deer shack by Gene Palm. On April 5, 2026 Easter morning, my cousin Gene Palm 'walked on,' with relief from all the suffering he had been enduring for six long months, and a smile on his face knowing he had provided his wife and children and grandchildren with the very best of everything he had to give of his love and respect. I spent three of his last days in his home talking and joking about the past; his memory coming and going between his silent gasps of pain, his ever-present smile fading then slowly coming back. Gene was always a guy with a smile on his face and a cigarette, Diet Coke, coffee, or sometimes beer in hand. He made time to listen when necessary; withheld advice until asked, and always admitted when he was wrong. He seemed genuinely buoyed by a life of charity which he bestowed on his friends and family throughout Minnesota; one example being that he periodically visited the city dump in Aurora ...