Finding Home

Another dispatch about Minnesota

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

I was raised in the desert, at the base of a mountain, in a place where temperatures regularly soar over 100 degrees (and stay there for several months of the year). There is a lot of beauty in my home state: the Grand Canyon, the Sonoran desert, the funky/artsy town of Tubac, and the thrill of watching the dark clouds roll in over the mountains on hot summer afternoon during monsoon season, waiting for the sky to burst open with rain that will come and go, fast and furious

There are things I miss about Arizona - mostly people, but also the glories of the Sonoran hot dog, the particular smell of the desert after a rain storm, the sight of a lizard scurrying cheerfully away if you step too close to where they were sunbathing.

It was home for a long time.

But, looking back, there were always signs that it wasn’t going to be home forever.

When I was in second grade, I had to write about my favorite place to visit and I chose Oklahoma, a state that I had never spent a night in. I’d driven through it the summer before, however, and it stuck out in my memory as the place where things started getting green — we’d stopped at a rest stop and I’d slide my feet out of my jelly sandals, scrunching my toes in the soft grass and thought it felt like luxury. I was jealous of people who got to live in places that had all four seasons and trees instead of cactus.

In high school, I take a trip to Minnesota with my best friend and her family. We stay at her family’s cabin and every day I plunge into the cold lake and swim for an hour, my first experience with open water swimming. I don’t take a shower the entire time I’m there. I scrub my body in the sauna and jump into the lake to rinse off. I’m eaten alive by mosquitos and one night we see bears in the woods; I am the happiest I have ever been.

As happy as I was that summer, I didn’t imagine that I would ever live in Minnesota. I went back home, then left for college in Michigan, then moved back to Arizona before a brief move to South Korea. Then there was another stint in Arizona (where I met my husband and my stepsons) before we moved to Iowa. In the first ten years of our marriage, my husband and I moved eight times, across two states and three cities. When it became clear that Iowa wasn’t meant to be our forever home, my weary husband (who had moved a lot as an Army brat) told me that he felt like he had one more move in him, so we needed to choose carefully.

We considered a few places (I had a job interview for a school in Philadelphia, North Carolina was on the list, I might have been able to make the case for Michigan), but we eventually chose Minnesota.

I have loved Minnesota since the first moment we moved here. I have fully realized that I am meant to live by water and I’d take a Minnesota winter over an Arizona summer ANY DAY OF THE WEEK AND TWICE ON SUNDAY.

Given that this is the forecast for the next week, you know I’m committed:

I often tell people here that I’m a Minnesotan by choice and not by birth, which is a distinction that sometimes matters. Native Minnesotans love the state, but are also sometimes skeptical about why someone (especially someone from somewhere warm) would choose to live here. Not everyone who moves here loves it as much as I do or has been able to find as much friendship in community as I have. I have another friend who is a transplant who once described the state as “an entire frozen tundra populated by polite introverts who will help shovel out your car but won’t tell you where they live”, which is not a wholly incorrect read on the state.

Tim wasn’t lying when he said that our golden rule is to mind our own damn business.

But it turns out that there is a corollary to this rule: If someone starts messing in our own damn business or the damn business of our neighbors, Minnesotans are gonna take that real personally.

Which is how we keep ending up on the national news.

It’s been a funny thing, seeing online how much love Minnesota is getting from people in other places who maybe didn’t really expect that Minnesotans would put up such a fight when ICE invaded. I’ve been a Minnesota evangelical for a long time, trying to convince loved ones and friends to move here, that this is a cooler, more diverse, happier place than the realize. But I realized this week that I’ve truly become a Minnesotan, and that this place is HOME in a forever kind of way, because I’m also feeling the Minnesota bashfulness that comes with all this attention. Yes, we love the support and yes we think this state is great, but we don’t usually brag about ourselves that much, we’re not usually a big deal and we kind of like it that way.

I think most of us would very much like ICE to leave and for us all to be able to go back inside for the rest of the winter.

I also realized I’m truly a Minnesotan when I posted this on Threds:

Seeing the crop art potential in a crisis is probably up there with eating hot dish and listening to Prince in terms of Minnesotan responses to trauma.

Things are still very, very hard here, but people keep taking care of each other. There is a network of parents at my daughter’s middle school that has raised over $15,000 in a week to help meet the basic needs of families who can’t work or safely leave their houses. There is a meeting later this weekend with women I’m in a community group with where we’ll be assembling first aid kits and protest supplies for people who need it. A fellow parent pointed me in the direction of a quiet network of community aid and I’ve signed up to help with laundry for families who can’t get to a laundromat and to do grocery delivery.

Our governor has talked a lot during his years in office about making Minnesota the best state in the country to raise children. After the last few weeks, I’m not sure we’re not already there.

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A few links for the weekend:

• The story of why Minnesota has a Confederate flag and refuses to give it back to Virginia is one of my favorite little bits of local history.

• In honor of MLK Day, a reminder of why Republicans need to keep his name out of their mouths and that he was so much more than just the “I Have a Dream” speech

• Everyone knows that ICE agents aren’t exactly the best and brightest among us but somehow reading this article about the hiring process was even worse than I expected.

• An interesting take on why citizens showing up to observe ICE is actually works

• I’ve had this song on repeat all week. It’s so dreamy and vibey and perfect on my writing song playlist.