I’m moving in less than a month, and this time its more traumatic than any of my dozen or so previous moves (I changed addresses 10 times in 10 years when I first came to “the Cities”), mostly because its not by choice. If I could, I’d stay in Bryn Mawr, my home for the last 15 or more years...a neighborhood that has hosted the first half of my daughters’ childhoods and has been my spiritual as well as physical home. This small section of Minneapolis feels a lot like my hometown, a small burg with a real sense of community, a place like “Cheers” where everybody knows your name. A place close to nature, a place full of nurture. I’ve lived all over the metro area, from Plymouth to St. Paul and everywhere in between, and nowhere has felt as welcoming as this little patch of real estate east of Wirth Park.
But, its not to be. there’s a price to pay to live here...the few houses that are for sale are out of my price range, generally $75-100,000 more than the same (or even nicer) house only a couple miles away in the next ring of suburbs, so move it is. I’ll miss the people, although I’ll stay as connected as I can and visit often. After all, I’ll only be a couple miles and an easy bike ride away. Its not like I’m moving to Fargo.
There are plenty of other things I’ll miss as well, and strangely enough one of them will be the rocks in my back yard. But then, these rocks are more than your ordinary hunks of granite and basalt, they’re a direct link to my past. Many of them come from the fields of my parents’ farm, where it was a spring ritual to “pick rocks” before the planting season. You had to get them out lest they be ingested by the combine during harvest which would wreak havoc on the machinery - creating an expensive and time consuming delay, right when you’re racing the calendar to get the fields cleared before the snow flies. And every year, there were always new rocks to find, no matter how diligent you had been collecting them the previous season. A never ending supply lies buried in the glacial soil of southern Minnesota. Pick those rocks, throw them on the wagon and haul them to the nearest rock pile. A backbreaking bit of labor.
And there they stayed, until I bought my first home on Queen Avenue, and brought a fair number north to become landscaping around a backyard pond. When I moved to Vincent Avenue, the buyers of my previous house didn’t want the pond, so the rocks followed me westward and now reside happily by another pond.
Over the years, they’ve been joined by their brothers from the north shore, fossils from Montana and stones from any other location where it was feasible to return with a trunk full of boulders. There are pebbles from Guatemala and New Mexico and coral from Key West mixed in as well. At times, I feel like Sisyphus, who in Greek mythology was condemned to forever roll a rock up a hill, never quite making it to the top. I’ve been dragging these rocks around the face of the Earth for the better part of my life.
Until now. They won’t make the move with me - I’ll have to start over with new rocks - a fitting metaphor for my life.
There are plenty more where these came from, I’ll never want for rocks. Its the rest of my life’s connections I’m thinking of. The older I get, the harder it becomes to roll that rock up the hill.
