Single Digit Mornings

Back from another Thanksgiving up north. I leave for Duluth with these grand ideas of spending the isolation out in the woods writing and reading; instead, I tend to eat a lot and play video games. This weekend's favorite was Super Mario Melee. Fun fun.

I always feel like half a person when I return home. Or less. A third of a person, perhaps. So many of the things I love and am passionate about aren't understood by my family. We end up returning to the same old tired topics--finances, how many vacation hours I earn, strained, polite disagreements over politics.

My family tends to go to bed around 9 pm, which according to my schedule is the hour I'm usually returning to my apartment from the day's activities. I stalk the house like some Shakespearean ghost, high on coffee, ranting on the page, playing video games, stealing pieces of pie, whipped on into the early am hours by the grandfather clock.

Highlights of the weekend included the bus ride there and back (I find bus trips very relaxing and meditative), drinking champagne with my mom and sister, and seeing a Great Gray Owl by our house, my most favorite of birds. Almost three feet tall, it bent the top branch of the pine tree down. It watched us austerely, swiveling its head slowly before silently floating farther into the field.

God its so oppressive up there. Low sky, brown everything, disintegrating family. Aaron, spending Thanksgiving in Central Michigan, put up a great post, It's That Type of Place. Everything on his list could just as easily apply to Northern Minnesota.