so, i was listening to a podcast today…wait, did your eyes just glaze over? anyway, the interviewee, mitch joel, was talking about how we all should embrace the squiggle. in other words, don’t imagine that your college major is going to be your straight-line life path. as a former aero-astro-engineer-turned-artist, who married a french-greek-english-major-turned-tax-preparer, i’m all about the squiggle.

you can see the whole oak limb here on my instagram feed.

weathered old oak limb

grass lake, saint paul, minnesota

we are all swimming in stories about ourselves. every moment is a story. but it’s only the stories we pay attention to that make us who we are. i, for instance, remember splitting my forehead open on a pogo stick, and running around the woods as a kid, and paying for college by myself, and meeting my husband for the first time in a bar in saint paul. i am, for better or worse, that particular Mary Jo in my own mind, adventurous, outdoorsy, independent, happily married. i could very well be the mary jo who was such a drama queen as a child that my siblings called me sarah, short for sarah bernhardt. or i could be the mary jo who got too serious with her first boyfriend and snuck around with him more than was healthy at that age. that would make me a boy crazy drama queen, i guess, if those were the stories about myself i paid attention to. last october, i took a walk in south minneapolis. the leaves were falling into piles everywhere. there was nothing formative or special about any of them in particular. the ones above just happened to be what i bent to pick up that day. and here they are, after half a year in a flower press, part of my story.

pressed leaves

minneapolis, minnesota

several years ago my husband came home from a two day seminar and shared with me some of the inspiring things he had learned. normally inspiring things heard in seminars dissipate in the brain by lunchtime, like early morning mist over the cattails. but this time, for whatever reason, several of the takeaways (and of course they were called “takeaways”) stuck with us, and have become part of our everyday vocabulary. one in particular has wormed its way deeply into our married life. for all i know the phrase is a widely known cliché, but when steve’s instructor recommended replacing  the question “what if?” with the question “what would it take?” it was as if my engineer brain was suddenly engaged, and impossible speculative goals were transformed into equations to be solved. the question was no longer “what if” we could spend an extended time in france in some improbable future, but rather, “what would it take” to get to france in two years. well, we would need to save x amount of money by y date and clear z number of weeks on our calendar. x + y + z = 3 months in southern france. algebra. i can do algebra.

red pine needles

shoreview, minnesota

i talk to my animals a lot. i talk to my dog all day long, as he accompanies me from room to room, and as he plays navigator in the front seat of the car. he talks to me too, in his way, with earnest gazes and gentle pawing alerts. i also talk to my chickens, and they talk back. they boss me around in the morning, and coo from their roosts in the evening. if you spend enough time alone outdoors, it’s hard to keep from feeling that there is some communication going on. the needles of this white pine turn a little bit yellow every winter, and then green up beautifully when summer returns. they’re trying to tell me something. maybe it’s something about winter. maybe it’s their way of putting a paw on my knee and telling me they’re thirsty. i’ll figure it out eventually.

white pine

sucker lake, saint paul, minnesota