Interested in a Bird's Eye View?

Kaye Bird was a prolific writer who loved to cover the simple yet most meaningful aspects of the human condition. She contributed a weekly column to the Woodville Leader, and the Sun-Argus, as well as monthly to the Clear Lake Museum Chronicle, all West-Central Wisconsin journals.  She passed away in December of 2016, but her beloved family has maintained her legacy, taking turns writing her column for her. This past week it has been my honor to have been asked to make my own contribution to A Bird's Eye View. The following is a slightly longer version of my humble offering:

Summer at the 45th

People who know my social media, my blog, and my life in general know that I’m a 45^th Parallel, Great Lakes kid who bleeds ice-blue water and glacier sand.  I can’t escape it--so grateful for where I live and where I’ve come from.  I may not get to have my beloved Lake Michigan near me right now at this stage of my life, but I have the strong and scenic St. Croix River just east of the Twin Cities. I live as close to it as my rent budget will allow; 5 walking blocks away from my front door, in a quirky little town called Hudson, on the Wisconsin side of the River, Exit 1.

I’ve written before on the peculiar kind of crazy that it takes to live at the 45^th. One of my favorite humans has asked me to revisit that blog post for you, as well as update you on how the summer is progressing in my neck of the woods…being that winter happened in another life, long ago…

Mid May

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 day, we have white, and then we have green.  And it produces in us, the Northerners, a certain kind of crazy.

When it’s winter, our world, our land, ourselves, are painted a monochrome of white-gray.  The red of a stray cardinal at the bird feeder is all that brings a twinge of our other life, like a dementia where we can almost but not quite remember what it was like to be warm and go barefooted. In the winter, I cannot for the life of me visualize the humid days of velvet moss, tornado warnings and thunderstorms, potted petunias in red-white-and-blue, or knee high corn, or cherry trees.  Even when I look back at photos to try and get a feeling for the summers past, it is completely alien—somebody else’s world. 

One day, it feels as if the colorless, temperature-less, eternity will surely be permanent and that even the word “summer” is a made-up word from made-up lands like Narnia or the Shire.  Then, the next day, little rivers of melting snow begin traversing the downhills of our streets.  And the day after that the air feels moister, less harsh. Then, BAM, everything, everything is full of color once again. And BAM, I can’t remember winter anymore, only four weeks prior. Can’t feel it. Can’t conjure it.  We are truly a crazy bunch of people who live year-in and year-out on this planet at this half-way Parallel, with this insane mental enchantment. We all seem to become two sets of people depending on the season, like Jekyll and Hyde; the one is not conscious that the other exists.

Mid-July

It was refreshing in May when the air gained humidity after a dry cold winter.  Fast forward two months. Now the air is much more hot and humid. Forget about a good hair day.

But the beauty, and more of the craziness, of summer at the 45^th is that we get to live about 3 or 4 different days within the span of one day. In one single day I can get up, take a long walk with my pup, Fifi, come home, go to work for my 4 hour summer teaching assignment, come home again, take a bike ride, do a bit of writing, have a little lunch, cut the grass, answer email, take another walk, put the laundry out to dry, take my cat to the coffee shop on my scooter (yes, I do that and she loves it because they give her cream), run errands, head out to a two hour band practice…and it’s still light outside when I get done with all of that.

It's Saturday around 9:00 pm. I take FiFi down to Hudson’s Lakefront Park for a walk, and to process the day. We head down Orange Street to the river, taking the park path south toward the beach house and the band shell. The sun has set but the sky is at that perfect stage where you don’t dare look away—the first stars peeking out, the reds and purples and oranges. On this particular evening the moon is setting just after the sun. It’s just a sliver, a finger nail, but lit up with the colors of the sunset all around it. So pretty.

 I pass a few hand-holding couples, and a man asleep on a bench with a 6 pack of Corona at his feet. At the beach there is a family, their silhouettes against the water, splashing and taking in the last moments of daylight. I can hear music so FiFi and I follow it toward the dike (It’s what we call the old toll bridge that juts out across the St Croix but no longer reaches all the way to the Minnesota shore). On the way she discovers a couple of college girls who have strung their hammocks between two trees, so of course she has to greet them and try to jump in.  Canada geese with their hatchlings are on the water floating in and out of the anchored sailboats that moor along the shoreline all summer long. 

The source of the music turns out to be our local hippie guitarist who plays Jimmy Buffet tunes, among others; (tonight he is playing “Would You Like to Swing on a Star”). He brings his amp out with him and you can find him on any given weekend either up on Locust Street near Knoke’s Chocolates, or, as this evening, down by the river. I say hi to him all the time, but I realize that I have never asked him his name. I make a note-to-self. There is no excuse for not knowing his name. He is singing so I don’t interrupt him.

We meet a few other dogs tonight: a Great Pyrenees, a beagle, a Chihuahua, and some sort of poodle mix. We make it about 2/3 down the dike when in the distance someone lets off some fireworks. Fifi is suddenly done helping me process my day at that point and we low-tail it home, passing the hammock girls who are delighted to see my funny little shepherd-corgi again, then past the swimming family, and finally past the sleeping bench man who has just woken up. He smells like alcohol, and looks like sadness. FiFi doesn’t let him pet her. She wants to move on (fireworks). I give him a smile and wish him a good evening. He lifts his beer bottle and toasts me a good evening back. I feel sorry for him because he is alone drinking, without a friend, without a dog, in this perfect summer twilight at the 45^th.

How lucky one is to have talents, activities, favorite humans and family with whom we can laugh--pets we can walk or take to get cream at the coffee shop. How beautiful July is here, where I live. In a world of pain, loneliness, and division, I find solace in my community. This is my town. This is summer at the 45^th.