Life and Fish Tacos

ß Lolo American Kitchen Rio Loco Cantina à This month I ate tacos from two restaurants in my home town of Hudson, Wisconsin. (See the postscript at the end of this blog entry for information about this gem along the St. Croix River). Ya, of course fish. 1.        Lolo American Kitchen. Lolo is located at the far south end of downtown Hudson, almost to the I94 Bridge on the east side of the road. In 2017 developers built a couple of early 20 th century style buildings with a smallish parking lot tucked under the bluff there. This piece of Hudson’s progress houses a framing gallery, a salon, and Lolo’s…so far. The restaurant is industrial/warehouse décor, but quieter than most restaurants of that type. I usually don’t prefer the loud echoes of the high ceilings that expose all of the pipes and air ducts, just because it’s so dang hard to hear the person next to me.   But, Lolo’s doesn’t seem to annoy me so much like that. It’s not...

A certain kind of crazy It’s mid-May now and West-Central Wisconsin at the 45 th Parallel has greened up nicely. I’m rambling with my dog along the St. Croix River walking path. She is overloading her senses with the smells of every blade of grass, every dandelion, every dead fish washed up from the spring flooding (Ya, I know… but she loves it). I, in the meantime, am soaking up the light that filters down through the branches of the 100 year-old cottonwoods. The air is thick with chlorophyll to the point that I may just walk out of here with my skin as green as the leaves on these ancient trees that mark my route.   It feels that tangible. I can’t even remember winter. I’m trying to picture myself just a month ago on this same walk. But the world was contrarily white then, unrecognizable to today.   And that is the nature of where I live. Like Prince Rilian in The Silver Chair, who was bewitched so that he became two different people at two different times of da...