i'm back. again.

Finally, we’re done celebrating Christmas. This past weekend, John and I took the boys to So Dak to visit my parents. When we left St. Paul on Friday, we had heard that the roads were questionable—icy in spots—but thought we’d give driving a shot. Even though the roads were fine, the conditions were stressful. Blowing snow alternating with flat light resulted in eyestrain that quickly turned to fatigue. Normally John does all the driving so that I may serve as a human audio book (for this trip, Nemesis, a post-Cold War thriller with a comet as weapon, by Bill Napier), but we took turns driving. On my turn, I marveled at how the colorless sky was connected to snow-covered fields by a graphite line on the horizon, making the world a study in grayscale.

The time with my family went better than I had hoped. It’s always anyone’s guess how it will go. My mother tends to go w-a-y overboard with her hospitality. I know she’s trying to make our stay extra special but she stresses herself out, gets crabby, and fails to spend any meaningful time with the boys.



Everyone tolerated each other as best they could given that we were housebound by weather. My parents’ house is on a lake, on the prairie. A complete lack of shelterbelts means that you feel all the wind, which is refreshing during the punishing heat of summer but lethal during the bitter cold of winter. Brutal. The boys wanted to sled so John and I took them to the highest point around my parents’ house and let them rip. As they were oblivious to frostbite-provoking cold, we had to drag them inside.

On Saturday afternoon, we took the boys to sled on St. Ann’s hill, the highest point in Watertown. It occurred to me that I had never sledded here as a kid. During my sledding days, my family lived across the street from a golf course so we had plenty of places to sled, but none were as impressive as St. Ann’s hill. It is a really big hill, ending—impressively, dangerously—at active railroad tracks. Even as an adult, I was tempted to take a run, but alas, gravity held me firmly on my feet. Needless to say, the boys had a blast.

Then we went downtown. Typically a depressing endeavor, the downtown business district is a fragment of its former “glory.” A shopping mall, Walmart, and a handful of big box stores on the edge of town, not to mention a citizenry seemingly unwilling to support its businesses, have turned it into a ghost town. Those establishments the remain are pathetic, maintained with little care for their appearance. Most seem to be on the verge of closing.

One bright ray: the Goss Opera House and Gallery. I remember hearing about this theater, on the upper floor of the building at the corner of Kemp and Maple, when I was a kid, in the late 1970s, around the time of the state’s centennial celebration. Then, the Town Players, a local theater group, was trying to raise money to renovate the historic theater to serve as their home. Undoubtedly, the project was ambitious and nothing came of the group's plans. Ironically, a recent transplant, with d-e-e-p pockets, purchased the building, turning the lower level (formerly a Rexall Drugs, plus a few more businesses in both directions, Maple-side and Kemp-side) into art galleries, shops (toys, a Life Is Good boutique), a private book collection cum bookstore, and an enormous coffeehouse. I have to say, the exposed brick, high tin ceilings, and arched passages between spaces reminded me of Stillwater. It’s incredibly cool, and I hope Watertown will support it. We didn't get a chance to see the King Tut (replicas) exhibit—maybe a compelling reason to visit again, soon.


John took these photos with his phone. Another saving grace is Lake Kampeska’s surrounding natural beauty, especially in the winter. My parents’ house is nestled into lovely corner of the lake, with water on one side, slough on another, and a county park on a third side.