In “The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse” Louise Erdrich writes, when describing a former nun and farm wife Agnes making shanges in the way she acted early during her lifelong transformation into Father Damien Modeste “As a farm wife, Agnes had leaned out with a hand on her hip, carried things on her hip, nudged doors open and shut with her hip. Men didn’t use their hips as shelves and braces.”
I did carry my children on hip (but also on my shoulders - if one has to walk longer distance, it is easier to carry a child on shoulders) and even today I pick laundry backets that are designed to be carried on hip, as I find those more comfortable to use.
But somehow I had never stopped to think of that way as something inherently female.
What a tourist notices: “At home we keep our bunnies in cages and our vegetable beds run free*. Here the bunnies run free, but the vegetable beds are kept in cages.”
*our Estonian vegetable bed are not frisky, they rarely run away or get lost
Minneapolis. A statue next to Washinton Ave
Censored - letters by Displaced persons
Only one possible way that leads straight to the library
bad-postcards:
KITTEN QUARTET
It is the strangest thing about Minneapolis - I have seen not one cat during my stay here. Not even one being walked on leach.
During my walks I only see the many strage grey squirrels and people walking dogs. And rabbits now and then.
Give me lift to the Wonderland!
I am reading “War for the Oaks” by Emma Bull and it is such a fun when I can find the places she mentions on the map and then just go and visit them!
Yet, when reading such American books where the reality and fantasy are supposed to mingle, I always wonder. No, I am quite sure, that I am not the intended reader and so my experience makes such books different for me than for American readers.
I believe that such narrations are supposed to work as melding of the mundane with the numinous. But even if I DO walk on the Nicollet Mall, for example, there is nothing mundane for me in it. It is a miracle and I DO remember all the time that back when Emma Bull was writing “War for the Oaks”, my own Soviet self had just as much expectation ever to see the Nicollet Mall with my own eyes as I had of seeing a phouka.
