Category: Other items of interest

Other items of interest · Travel

Evening Flight

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I can count on one hand the times I’ve flown in a small 2- or 4-seater plane and I don’t even need my thumb to complete the tally.  Last night’s flight, in a Beechcraft Bonanza, made four.  On a spectrum of summer evenings, this one was a definite top 10 with good company, cloudless skies and a rare spontaneous experience.  Our flight path took us northeast from Rochester to Red Wing, south over the Mississippi River nearly to Winona before heading back west.

Over the years, with countless trips from Hokah to Lonsdale, Vasa to Alden and all the libraries and bookmobile stops in between, I know the blue line highways curve through the rolling hills of our Driftless area.  But there is a missing link between knowing there are hills and only seeing our corner of Minnesota as a distant 2-dimensional view from the lightly scratched window of a Delta commercial flight.  From 3,000 feet the geological undulations are beyond beautiful. 

The evening sky had that early August haze and, while the groves of trees still held their verdant green color, the fields were twinged with late summer yellow, ripe for harvest.  It was evident that within weeks the landscape would shift from green to amber to rich fall browns.  

I always think of the Zumbro as more of a small stream than a real river but flying over the watershed showed an extensive network of creeks and a main channel that eventually winds its way east.  And then, almost to Red Wing, but not quite to Wisconsin, we banked right and so we could follow the mighty Mississippi past Wabasha, over Lake City (the home of waterskiing) and to Alma.  The bluffs on each side climb out of the river valley.  There was a small smattering of boat traffic, including one barge.  With the sun setting over my right shoulder, we made another sweeping right turn before engaging the instrument approach and landing.  After parking on the tarmac, we helped spray and wipe the leading edge of the wings and tail to remove the summer bug splats.

Our last single engine flight was in September 1991 when a Swiss cousin took Richard, Dad and me up for a view of the Alps around Luzerne.  While the landscape may have been more dramatic that day, this most recent flight was maybe even more memorable as it gave us a different view of our chosen home.

  • Wisconsin shore
  • Minnesota bluffs
  • Summer sunset
Other items of interest · Writing

Migrating

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I have resurrected my long dormant WordPress skills to recreate this new personal website. While I have never been a real writer (unlike someone such as Elizabeth Klein who said that for her “writing is like breathing”), I tend to periodically dabble. In the immediate pre- and post- retirement days, I wrote to capture the swing of emotions as I left my professional days behind. And, since I preceeded a good friend into this next chapter of our working lives by six months, she had requested I share any insights. She claimed my musing were useful although I am still skeptical.

At the onset of our Covid-19 confinement as days merged totally undistinguishable into one another and spurred on by The Isolation Journals, I thought to capture some of the emotions of these unprecedented times. And it worked – sort of. But, never having taken a creative writing class, the daily exercises felt artificial. So another nonstarter.

But nagging at the back of my brain was the fact that my Raverly profile included a link to my long-abandoned Tumblr account, The Bead Working Librarian. This site was initially created in December 2013 as Thing 1 at the launch of 23 Mobile Things (the mobile edition of 23 Things on a Stick). As the title suggests, my artistic focus at the time was still on beads but the individual posts reflect my switch to fiber. My first thought was to simply migrate all the content to its own page within this new site so as to not loose the thread of my early knitting experiences. But, having gone through the painstaking work of migrating content several times for the SELCO website, my earlier writing simply did not merit that amount of time and work. Hence the content will stay at The Bead Working Librarian until Tumbr or this link disappears into cyberspace. What I will migrate from Tumblr is the crisp formatting that fits my writing style – – lots of pictures with short descriptive phrases to describe the current events in my life.