Dear Cold Springs,

Men build empires from granite
facades taken from the ground you keep.
Most people on Minnesota Highway 23
pass without knowing the history
you keep to yourself. Most think you’re only
a small town with a brewery and a stadium
for a local baseball team, where people
from farmlands go after the last hay bale thrown.
Some pass you on the way to Saint Cloud,
industry and fortunes sought, but a few stay.
It is the solitude they seek, quiet conversations,
a pastoral land where your son is destined
to marry the girl down the street.
In the local bakery familiar conversations are shared,
and without a word, the baker knows
what you will order when you walk through the door.
Your children complain, and when grown
go seek a life in the city to act smart
and feign forgetfulness of country ways,
but in conversation and memory,
a part of them stays.

Let the children come back to you,
Davenport

*Cold Springs, Minnesota

The early snows fall soft and white and seem to heal the landscape. There are as yet no tracks through the drifts, no muddied slush in the roads. The wind sweeps snow into the scars of our harvest-time haste, smoothing the brow of hill, hiding furrow and cog and trash in the yard. Snow muffles the shriek of metal and the rasp of motion. It covers our flintier purposes and brings a redeeming silence, as if a curtain has fallen on the strivings of a year, and now we may stop, look inward, and rediscover the amber warmth of family and conversation.

At such times, locked away inside wall and woolen, lulled by the sedatives of wood-smoke and candlelight, we recall the competing claims of nature. We see the branch and bark of trees, rather than the sugar-scented green of their leaves. We look out the window and admire the elegance of ice crystal, the bravely patient tree leaning leafless into the wind, the dramatic shadows of the stooping sun. We look at the structure of things, the geometry of branch and snowflake, family and deed.

Even before the first snow, we view the world differently in winter. We watch the lawn settle into the sleep of frost and the last crumpled leaf quiver on the oak, and feel the change. At night the skies are cold and clear, and stars shine like the dreams of serpents. The hillsides turn brown and gray; the edges of stalk and blade stand out starkly. Dark clouds settle on the mountain ridges. Storms rumble in like freight trains. Rain rattles the roof and thutters at the window.

Then comes the snow, and we once again wonder at how it transforms the familiar objects of our everyday world.

When snowflake drifts the road we head indoors and resign ourselves to the quiet crackle of the wood fire. The example of the woodpile and the well-stocked larder tells us that we can achieve what we dream, and winter brings us long, silent nights to dream on.