6 april 2023 Writing In My Head

 
    Standing outdoors across the highway from the Riverside Lutheran Church in Wannaska on April 3 2023 on a overcast Monday morning at 32-degrees above zero in my insulated Carhartt bibs Arctic Pro boots insulated gloves baclava and Stormy Kromer felt cap as sleet pellets fall intermittently I am content waiting there for a ride back home to Palmville neither cold nor too warm occupying a quiet spot in an otherwise often unquiet space amid elf-sized mini-motorcycles and  four-wheelers side-by-sides built for utility and exhilaration outside a building that used to be the Wannaska Elementary School another otherwise once-upon-a-time noisy place ‘way back when.

    Standing there, I became aware that for upwards of 129 years, my mother’s family have trod the old animal and Indian trails laying amid the substrate and machine-disturbed soil and clay below the line-painted face of Highway 89 asphalt nearing the crossing of the Roseau River Bridge north of the church or they rode bumpily-along in horse-drawn wagons, or comfortably on horseback or in old gasoline-powered vehicles that were long gone to rust decades before I was born their hulks or lack thereof deteriorated by weather crumpled by machines or frost-heaved soil or drowned in river beds gravity having its way, or pushed aside by ice floes, soft and feathery florescent green algae growing along its die-formed lichen-covered fender edges seen in the sunshine, or as flat steel-tired wooden wagon wheels, or crusty knobby-rubber tires protruding from a silt-packed, grass-topped river bank, origins of which unknown to contemporary humans become, right or wrongly, a fabrication of their finder’s imagination.

    I remember that my Grandmother Annie Berg Palm’s funeral was  in that Riverside Church in April of 1969. I remember how I thought the church was small and similar to other old country churches I’d been in with my folks, not really grasping nor caring frankly, the reasons her funeral wasn’t held in the Palmville Community Free Church, on land that her father-in-law Louis Palm donated 57 years earlier, or why. When you’re young like I was then, family history isn’t paramount to your existence; conversations about family aren't extremely interesting (like an unsolved murder, undaunted courage, hunting exploits, or buried treasure) are often plainly boring.    

    A person may regret not paying attention to it when there’s no one left to learn from anymore, or alternatively you’ve adopted another’s family history or culture different from your own, and immersed your interests elsewhere. As for me with no siblings close-in, either side my age, I was primarily raised around much older family members. I listened more out of lack of anything else to do. Remember there were no cellphones, very limited TV reception, or relative freedom to go anywhere else (too young to drive). Reading was important and aided my imagination.   

   Once I began writing in 1970, it started the ball rolling, little by little. It gave me ‘an out,’ an escape beyond the immediate, just as I was

  I began writing in the light from a kerosene lamp.

Fuel oil stove, a cast iron skillet, a pot, a bed, a small table, no one around for miles. Isolation proved fruitful and thought-provoking.

doing ‘writing’ in my head waiting outdoors on a cold April morning 54 years later, for a ride home from Wannaska. I could have waited indoors among people where it was warmer but then there were too many distractions. I needed to exercise my imagination just as I need to exercise my body. I needed to write inside my head ... then let it out, here. 

    Coincidentally, three days later, my wife was purging a dormer in our house of unneeded hoards of stuff she had accumulated and chanced upon an unmarked envelope of mine whose contents, one volume of my journal "Hot Coffee & Cold Beer" (1983) that I'd been searching for many years. Here's a page that tied in perfectly to my present mindset: