May 12, 2013 - St. Peter, MN. Played at River City Eatery last night. As always, a great crowd - including old friends Shelly and Bri (first Cousin, once removed) who shared her new book with me. Outside of Side Street Espresso in Alaska, I don't often play at coffee shops/restaurants, but these folks are always the exception. Mari and Andy run a great place and they are two very warm people in a state that has made "being inviting" its motto. We finished, after drifting into long conversations and readings from the new book (Six Truths), at about 2 am. My room was courtesy of Bruce Boldt and Prairie Wind Folk Music and Bluegrass Association - a wonderful gift, and an organization well worth donating to - I do. Both Bruce and Ivan Harris, fellow Kerrville musicians, took the guitar in my breaks and played some of their own music - you just have to love a life of friends wherever you go. Windom feels like another of my hometowns every time I come there.... Breakfast this morning and now on the road again.
It is odd weather here. Everywhere I go they are talking about climate change. Its mid-May, but it feels like November. The wind is brisk, blowing out of the Northwest, people are bundled up. It fell into the thirties last night - it was actually warmer in Alaska. I have gotten into the habit of blaming myself for this. Whenever I leave the state I seem to bring bad weather with me, leaving Alaska to bathe in warmth and sunshine. Arghhh!
Here in St. Peter I am surrounded by a red brick world - the Minnesota of the 1880s. If you strain just right, and imagine that the cars aren't here and that the roads are dusty dirt rather than the asphalt we know so well, you can almost imagine the horses and carriages, see back into that past. A lot of Minnesota is like that and, more often then not, people talk here in terms of who they graduated with thirty or forty years ago and, when they talk about not being in their home town, they are talking about a journey of an hour or two at most. Minnesota grows its future in the seeds of its past.
The more I travel the back roads, the "blue highways" the more I realize how much it is still like this. Yes, its true, that a many if these small towns teeter on their last legs. Masonic lodges left empty. Storefronts shut down, populations aging. But there is something else, a vibrancy a possibility, a hint of a future on the horizon - rich in music, art and imagination. I watch it come forth like a flower in Spring. For though it is cold now, Spring will surely come.