Postcard: November 9, 2020
Author Archives: Leslie Schultz
Postcards: November 2, 2020–Return to Bucksnort
Yesterday, returning from our trip to Lanesboro to celebrate Tim’s birthday, it was beautifully sunny and warm. Since we’d gotten an early start, we decided to detour to take look at Eagle Bluff Residential Environmental Learning Center (an organization we’d visited long ago when I was helping to raise money for them.) As navigator, I realized that we were on the very county highway which could take us back to Bucksnort! We’d visited last year–just a dot on the map but a trout stream of exceptional clarity and sparkle. Here’s a link to a few lines about it from 2019.
What is the allure of this tiny place? Maybe it’s just the name? Or knowing that I will be rereading Hemmingway’s collection of fiction, The Nick Adams Stories, later this fall with my Book Group? (Remember the short story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” from high school English class, perhaps?) In any case, something drew us to return to this swift-running trout stream yesterday. Tim commented that the air seemed more fresh and the colors more vivid there than in other places.
Or maybe it’s the image of the dam? The human-built addition that affects the rest natural world, creating more concentrated power for an instant, more leaps and agitations and aeration? I am wondering about the Brown Trout and their own leaping and falling, seeking and finding and resting as contemplate the human political cycles we’ve grafted onto the seasonal ones, the rise and fall of Fortune’s Wheel. Like Boethius, I keep seeking consolation in the midst of mental agitation, if not in pure philosophy than at least in poetry.
These photographs don’t do beautiful Bucksnort justice, but perhaps they offer a hint of the refreshment we found there at the conclusion of a welcome (mostly) screen-free weekend, free from most thoughts of volatile national roiling. We simply basked in the natural flow of Trout Run Creek, the green streaming of water weeds, the clouds reflecting in the double movement of sky and water.
Wishing you all moments of the deepest serenity in the fraught week ahead, knowing the ups and downs are all part of the flow. Remember to breathe!
LESLIE
Happy Halloween, 2020!
Halloween "Nine little witches, Nine little hats, Nine orange pumpkins, Three black cats." (Leslie Schultz)
Late in 2019, I was visiting my friend, Elvin Heiberg, at his home in Parkview East. Knowing my love of textiles, he invited me to see the work of master quilter, Edna Ness, who was selling some of her creations in his building. Her work is deft, imaginative, and beautifully executed. Immediately, I fell in love with a triple trio of little witches (did anyone else read Eleanor Estes’s The Little Witch over and over as a child?). I see that this is a whimsical riff on an historic pattern, especially popular in the 1930s called variously “Sunbonnet Sue” or “Sunbonnet Babies” for children’s bed quilts.
Here is a close-up of the center witch with her pumpkin and cat, so you can see the workmanship. Each dress has a different fabric, and each print is perfectly to scale.
As my daughter knows, I have long had an irrational but powerful fear of applique work. (Why? Who knows? That something will emerge puckered or askew after hours of work, I suppose.) In recent years, I have begun to counter this, helped by a class at our local quilt shop, Reproduction Fabrics. I made a wall hanging with birds and berries for my sister a few Christmases ago, and I have more applique projects planned (perhaps even incorporating machine sewing! Another hurdle for me that has been partially cleared by the past six months of sewing masks.) For now, I will just enjoy regarding up close the work of another quilter that is on display in my own kitchen.
(For a perspective on the “Sunbonnet Sue” design, please search for an article on Bertha Corbett Melcher, the “Mother of the Sunbonnet Babies” from the Minnesota Historical Society’s website.)
Postcard Images: Early Snow October 26, 2020
Postcard: October 19, 2020
