Sunday, November 28, 2021

Mendota

 






If you go down to the start of American Minnesota, which is both a terrible tragedy, and almost the beautiful world we live in, you will find the first stone house. And then train tracks which I haven't seen used yet by any train, and then woods all along the river for a long way.

To the left the mountain bikers ride, and people walk there too, because it is the way to go. But to the right, for a little while, is one of the lesser traveled paths of the river triangle that is the start of Saint Minneapolis. This is a very good quality on a beautiful late Fall Saturday after Thanksgiving.

But either way

These are my favorite woods.

Walking there with my lovely wife, happy as I can get, I thought of a poem.

To know the woods is to love them.

It goes:

To know the woods is to love them.

And then the rest of the poem writes itself.

I wondered why I like these woods the best, even if it's all very close up there at the top of the Saint Minneapolis Woods Ranking Board. 

Why do I like these woods the best?

They are unkempt. They are dilapidated and unused. They are falling apart forever and impervious to it. The roots of the trees are all exposed in the sand, like they're walking at a pace too slow for us sprinters through time to see. All the trees are falling down too, because they grew too big, or because they're sleeping in, or because they can and so why wouldn't they.

I would fall down like that.

You would too.


Actually, I don't know why all the trees are falling down, or why I like these woods best, or why we would fall down like that, but it looks right. It looks completely accidentally perfect. It looks like if you really just let everything be, it will all come out right in the end. As long as trees are involved.

Get the trees involved.

 Everything is falling down and growing up, all at once.

To know the woods is to love them.

For some reason I pictured someone saying all the shortcomings of these woods and saying "I like them, but I don't love them."

And then I imagined saying "Then you don't know them."

But I would never, ever say that. 

Mostly because no one would say they don't love these woods. 

Because to know the woods is to love them.







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