The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
I spent last weekend back in St. Paul helping with the Great March Move. This is what I’m calling it these days. I hemmed curtains and washed windows and did other Mom-type tasks and did not grumble when I was asked to load my car and haul more things. I’ve pretty much accepted that our garage is nothing more than a staging area for large plastic bins. Someday, we will be able to see the back wall of our garage again.  Someday there will be no bins. But not yet. I figure I have about a month to relax until the Great May Move for the other kid who lives with us (but not really) begins.
In case you haven’t been moving anybody’s anything anywhere this month, I’m happy to report that spring is trying to well, spring in St. Paul, too. However, the entire city needs a good vacuuming and then maybe a tidal wave or two to get rid of all the grit and grime on the boulevards and at intersections. Oh, and if anyone is needing a plastic bag, there are a couple thousand of them wrapped around light posts all along I 94. St. Paul! Pick up your stuff! Of course, we have our springtime issues up here, too. Road kill comes to mind. But at least, up here, someone picks up the flattened raccoons, the trees start to bud, and we’re on our way to April.
By Saturday evening, much as I love St. Paul, I decided that it was probably best viewed from across the High Bridge. I asked my daughter, the driver, to take me over there away from the crushed beer cans and Whopper wrappers along Grand Avenue. As newlyweds, her dad and I had lived on that side of the river in a big old Victorian with leaded glass windows where, at night, it was possible to see the domes of the Cathedral and State Capitol fully lit and all the other lights twinkling below. Those lights are what made me fall in love with St. Paul when I was the age my daughter is now. When we left the city a few years later for lush, green, Wisconsin, it wasn’t so much the house I missed as it was the perspective of being so high up above a city like St. Paul, watching the sun set and lights begin to twinkle below far away on the other side of the Mississippi River. Which, I suppose, is why every so often I go back when I’m in the city. To gain perspective and to remember.
In March, particularly.
The Loon Whisperer 