January 2015

  Don’t worry.  I won’t forget about the snow.  Every night before one of these comes out, though, I toss and turn, trying to think of the next one to write, and if I don’t agree to write the one that needs to get written next (according to my subconscious), I don’t get to sleep.

I have lost my ability to shrug off the cold. As a kid, the cold wasn’t just cold, it was part of my identity:  I am better than you because I can endure the cold.  South Dakota has a lot of sour-grapes values:  I can’t have nice things, so I’m better than people who can.

The early cats in my life are going to be really hard to write about, so I’m going to skip it for now: right now you just get the dogs. Vague Red Dog Sorry, vague red dog.  I only vaguely remember you:  you must have been an Irish setter.  You belonged to Chris, maybe.  I

  I’m tempted to write this one like a horror story, but that would miss the point. The boogeyman lived inside an old, disconnected furnace inside my great-grandmother’s house, just across the gravel road from my grandparents’ house.  It wasn’t until just this morning that I realized her house was a mother-in-law house:  probably because

Lee’s Corner, population 3, marked on all car-trip-sized South Dakota maps at the corner of Highways 34 and 50.  The farm lies a few miles straight north along the old Star Route road. In rural areas, a lot of the time the post office used to be a farmer’s wife in a station wagon driving from farm to

I wanted to write about my step-grandmother Chris, but I can’t, not as such — I’ve written about her twice now and have come up with little more than a physical description and a big mess. So instead let me tell you about the table at Grandpa’s house, which I hope will cover what I

Sometimes places strike me and they end up getting a kind of fantastic layer painted over them, although it feels more like I’m carving and discovering the true shapes underneath than adding something. Minneapolis, for example, is a noir fairyland constantly hovering on the edge of freezing.  Fat flakes descend through the orange-and-green haze of