You must have to be a patient and forgiving sort to live near Roseau, on Minnesota’s northern border. People there have to put up with things we non-border people take for granted. The freedom to move around America, for example.

It took an around-the-country trip by a California teacher to tell me something about my adopted state that I didn’t know. There’s an airport in Minnesota on which a runway spans two countries, surrounded by some unwelcoming feds. Read more

If there was a nuclear core of my childhood, it was probably the Woolworth’s store on Main Street in my hometown, which sat next to a W.T. Grant, which was across the street from an S.S. Kresge.

My home milltown had a vibrant downtown and if you were a kid with a couple of pennies, which you might have lifted from your mother’s purse and still won’t say out loud, you headed for Woolworth’s.
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