We spend this extended Thanksgiving weekend hanging with our respective families, making a pie and other Thanksgiving dinner items, discussing wedding plans and visiting venues, and poring through shelves of used bookstores. I got to walk along the Mississippi with my niece Zena’s sweet three-legged dog Hank.
We also took a trip up to Duluth. The city is dramatically situated on the Western end of Lake Superior. It’s a deep-sea port, and impossibly large ocean-going ships dock here, having followed a route not far from the one we just took, along the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes.
A local brewery reminded us that Lake Superior contains 10% of all the fresh water on the planet, adding “100% of our beer is made with it.” I was glad to start my solo wandering within a few miles of the source of the Mississippi river. In a few days I would follow its more than two-thousand mile journey to the Gulf of Mexico..
Back in Northeast Minneapolis I admired the grid of streets named after U.S. Presidents, lined up in the order of their presidential terms. I’ve been told was that this done as a way to help new immigrants pass their citizenship test.
It’s not a perfect system: John Adams seems to be missing, his son’s street is called “Quincy,” Grant’s street is named “Ulysses” and there’s a Howard street between Madison and Monroe. I could be wrong, but don’t think there was a president Howard. I love this little bit of patriotic, didactic urban design and I think I am a bit better at reciting the Presidents in order after navigating around the neighborhood.
That is a fine pie. I’ll have to give lattice crusts a try sometime.