Peg Kerr's Journal

This past week's Year of Adventure outing was a visit to the Minneapolis State Capitol to view the renovations that were finished in 2019.



I went with a friend of mine, and we had planned to take the tour when the legislative session was over, but as they had not been able to finish a budget, the House and Senate were in special session. We listened for an hour to the debate in the House about the GOP proposal to strip immigrants of the ability to access Minnesotacare, the state's health care. Then, we took the tour. I'm ashamed to say it, but I had never visited the Capitol before. I was rather stunned by the beauty of the place. There was a display of battlefield flags from the Civil War in the rotunda. There were also a series of huge paintings of various battles during the Civil War in the Governor's Reception Room (a beautifully ornate room, modeled after a room in Venice).

This placard particularly struck me, given the events in Los Angeles:

EMPIRES PLACE THEIR RELIANCE UPON SWORD AND CANNON: REPUBLICS PUT THEIR TRUST IN THE CITIZENS' RESPECT FOR LAW. IF LAW BE NOT SACRED, A FREE GOVERNMENT WILL NOT ENDURE --IRELAND.

This collage is pulled from some of the beautiful elements of architecture we saw during the tour.

One of the representatives I was listening to on Monday was just assassinated. I am beyond pissed. I am heading out the door to join today’s protests. I wasn’t going to go because of some family stuff going on, but I am so livid.

Capitol



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

As I posted last Saturday, I have been working to assemble an anthology to submit to a contest with the Minnesota Authors Project (among others). I hadn't assembled as many authors as I had hoped, but we put together a nice little ebook, and I was proud of it and excited to enter the contest. We finished pulling it all together by 6 pm the day before the final deadline, and I went to the contest portal to submit it.

And at the last minute, after I had spent a good 40 minutes working my way through the portal and was just about to push the 'Submit' button, a Terms and Agreement page popped up that turned all my hopes to ashes.

The book had to be already published.

Now, I had inquired about that. The person I'd gotten the flyer from wasn't sure, and the website didn't mention anything about that requirement.

I had arranged with a letter of agreement with my authors specifically stating my understanding that this WASN'T a promise of publication, but that if we won the contest, we could make decisions about publishing at that time.

So, extremely mortified, I had to go back to the authors and explain. I'd done my due diligence, I had wondered about that very question, checked the website and the flyer, and I'd still gotten it wrong.

Some of the contributors wondered whether we could quickly self-publish, throwing it up on Amazon, of course the very reasonable expectation requested was that I would then promote and distribute it. I had very little time to make the decision, and I never heard back from one of my contributors, and I was badly rattled by making such a mistake. Maybe it was a lack of courage, but I just couldn't make the promise. I don't have my own website or any kind of mailing list. I didn't think I could (after letting my contributors down so badly) volunteer to do something that would let them down even further.

So we missed the contest deadline.

I am going to try to find more contributors and figure out a way to publish it. And hope that we can enter it in the contest next year.

I feel so very mortified and foolish. At least two of the contributors wrote new material for this project, and I feel keenly that I let them down. Professional embarrassment is the WORST.

But! This is the year of adventure, and that means trying new things. And sometimes, when you try new things, you fail. And that (I am telling myself firmly) is okay.

Here is the beautiful cover that Bruce Bethke designed for the book we had planned, and I hope eventually it will come to fruition.

This past weekend was a lot of fun. I had significant events on both Friday and Saturday, and I was rather torn over which should be the subject of my collage. I decided to not decide, because both events had a common theme (if you squint): they were both first-time events.

On Friday, I had my first big event for my Year of Adventure: my friends Dăna and Scott took me turkey hunting! Here is Dăna's report:

Peg accomplished her first Birthday adventure with Scott and me today - at her request, we took her wild turkey hunting! 🦃 We met her at the Cannon Falls exit around 4:30 am, and she followed us to our friend Keith’s farm and to just inside the edge of the woods to our parking spot.

Peg donned the camouflage clothing we brought for her and off we went, hiking across the bottomlands fields and up to the top of the bluff, with gear in hand. We climbed into Keith’s turkey blind and Scott set up our Tom and Hen decoys about 25 yards into the corn field. It was too warm for gobbles unfortunately and no turkeys showed up. The winds were ridiculous (sustained winds of 26 mph with gusts up to 46 mph!!) and blew our Tom over a couple times so we put him away and left just our hen out. A beautiful coyote cut across the field and disappeared into the woods on the other side - that was super fun! Our highlight came when Peg pointed out a Peregrine Falcon that stooped on our hen decoy, pulling up just inches away!! We wonder what would have happened if it carried our and decoy off with it. We do not know anyone who has had an experience like that! A once in several lifetime experience! Strong winds had torn a roof section out of Keith's nylon blind last night so we had a skylight to watch that falcon through. Perfect! The barred owls were calling boisterously. A red-tailed hawk flew overhead. But no turkeys. We moved down to the bottomlands again mid-morning. The songbirds calls were beautiful and some wildflowers and ferns were blooming and were magnificent! We showed Peg a new bird ID app called Merlin (Cornell Lab of Ornithology - it's free and very fun - check it out!) Peg was delighted with it!

We moved back up top and sat under a big cedar tree next to Keith's wildlife food plot. Unfortunately we spooked a turkey while getting in there, but at least Peg saw a wild turkey, albeit running away!!

At 10 am it was time for Peg to go and prep food for tomorrow's baby shower for Fiona and Alona.

We had a fun morning even though the turkeys didn't cooperate! Peg was a trooper and was interested in everything. She even tried her hand at using a slate turkey call to call to the turkeys!!

What a fun way to celebrate Peg's birthday! We all had a great time! And Peg tried something totally new! Great job!

As Dăna said, I had to leave the hunt early because of the other big weekend event: a baby shower for Fiona and Alona's baby (my first grandchild). Alona's dad and stepmom hosted, and her mom and stepdad were there, too. Alona's sister Mary is also pregnant, and so it was a double shower, with many beautiful gifts for both couples. The sweater that Alona is holding in the collage was handmade by her mother Nancy. There was also a gorgeous handmade quilt (a bookcase with a cat) and several beautifully crocheted blankets. We served brunch for everyone, and I think a wonderful time was had by all.

Image description: The collage is divided into two triangular portions. On the left side, a woman (Peg) smiles at the camera, dressed in camo in the dawn light. A pair of binoculars is slung around her neck. Overlaid over her is a peregrine falcon making a dive, talons outstretched. Lower right corner: a Tom turkey decoy. On the right side, two women (Alona, seated, and Fiona standing behind her) smile at the camera. Alona is holding a hand-knit red baby sweater with intricate cabling detail.

First Time



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

May Day at Powderhorn Park has been revived, although the experience is changing.

Our Mayday celebration began in 1974, initiated and shepherded by In the Heart of the Beast Theatre (HOBT) as an annual event with broad community participation. For nearly 50 years HOBT enacted the Mayday Parade, the Tree of Life Ceremony, and the Festival in Powderhorn Park. In April 2023, HOBT announced that it would no longer produce Mayday, and “released it” to the community.

Now, in 2025, there is no single organization producing Mayday; the Parade is built by decentralized community groups hosting puppet-making workshops and the Semilla Center for Healing and the Arts is sponsoring an artistic cohort and workshops to create the Tree of Life Ceremony. Festivities in Powderhorn Park following the Parade will be quite different than in HOBT years, with no organized food trucks or large music stages. You are encouraged to bring picnics and enjoy the beautiful park.

I was thrilled to have May Day back, although I wasn't able to attend as much as I usually do--I was in Eden Prairie assisting my mom with some things last Sunday, and so I missed the parade and the Tree of Life ceremony.

I got to the park by about 2:30, and there was still plenty to see that delighted me and reminded me of May Days of yore. This day is always like an explosion of color. I first learned about May Day in the park from an email that a friend sent out years ago. It was simply a stream-of-consciousness description of the sights that could be seen in the park that day, and it intrigued me so much that I decided I had to check out this event.

May Day is flower crowns and bicycles and dreadlocks and Morris dancers. It is a drum circle that pulses out all afternoon into the evening. It is brass instruments, belly dancers, face paint, ribbon skirts, kilts, laughter, and elf ears. It is bared shoulders, swirling capes, and picnics and booths set up around the lake, where the crowd circles along the path, not in any hurry. It is blankets on Blanket Hill, and the call of the horns as the boats row across that lake, bringing the grinning Sun. It is signs with urgent messages, and children in elaborate paper mache costumes pulled by their parents in decorated wagons. Sometimes it snows, and sometimes the sun in the sky overhead roasts everyone. But either way, everyone is having a wonderful time.

It is Beltane. It is the earth coming alive and saying, yes, we are still here. We are a community, and we take care of each other.

I love May Day. I am so happy to see it back.

This week's design is perhaps a bit messy and confusing, but I was trying to capture that explosion of color sensation that May Day always brings.

A collection of images from the Powderhorn May Day festival: a stage with musicians playing is set up in a street, silhouetted against a brilliantly blue sky. Above the stage, paper mache birds surround a giant Benjamin Franklin puppet holding a sign that reads 'Well, Mr. Franklin, have we got a Republic or a Monarchy? A REPUBLIC IF YOU CAN KEEP IT." The May Day Sun puppet is over to the left. Below it is an alebrije, a snail constructed on a bicycle. Center: a woman in a red tulle skirt and wearing a red top hat, holding a saxophone. To the right of the woman is a giant paper mache head with closed eyes. To the right of that, a couple dances in the street to the music of the band, standing in front of deer-like alebrije. Lower center: the fire birds and drums that are part of the boats that traditionally row the Sun across Powderhorn Lake. Lower left corner: the head of a large paper mache rabbit.

May Day



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

I celebrated a Very Significant Birthday this past weekend.

My last Very Significant Birthday took place during the height of the Covid epidemic, and I spent it alone, which sucked. I did a lot of thinking about how I wanted this birthday to be different.

This will be a significant year in several ways: I will be welcoming my first grandchild in June and will probably retire sometime within the next year.

I had a great example from my own parents on how to live a fulfilling life in retirement and beyond. My mom played her cello up until the age of 95. When my dad was in his 80s, he raised $45,000 with Rotary and used the money to go to the Dominican Republic and install biosand water filters to give people clean drinking water.

They showed me how important it is to have strong relationships as you age, to keep reaching out to people. And they showed me how important it is to keep learning, stretching, and trying new things.

With this in mind, I issued a challenge to my family, friends, and some acquaintances I would like to know better. I sent this message out in an email to about sixty people, and posted it on Facebook, and I am posting it here, too.

Let's have an adventure together sometime this year.

I am inviting you to think of something we can do, maybe that you already enjoy and think I might like to try that we can do together. Or maybe you would like to try it together for the first time with me. What can you come up with? Have you always wanted to take blacksmithing lessons? Do you want to spend an afternoon teaching me to play the banjo? Salsa dancing? Go rock climbing or make the apricot-torte that your great aunt learned how to make in Austria?

Possible questions:

Do you mean just me or is it okay to do something with me and my partner? Sure, include your partner, or better yet other friends, too. (Maybe I didn't have your partner's email address) Let's make it a party. Part of the point of this is that I want to make new friends.

But I don't live in the same city as you / I'm not going out because of health reasons. Use your imagination! Perhaps we can travel to a mutual point? Perhaps we could take a cooking class together on Zoom?

Peg, this is weird. I don't feel comfortable with this. Well, yes, it is little weird and frankly, I feel nervous about sending this challenge out, but I'm trying to stretch myself a bit! Maybe you might enjoy doing this, too? But if you are really not interested, no hard feelings or shame and I won't be offended if I don't hear back from you on this. But on the other hand, I am excited to see what ideas people might have.

Sorry, I'm busy this month. I'm looking forward to spreading adventures out over the coming year.

We're just passing acquaintances. Why are you asking me? Because I'd like to come to know you better and I think it might be fun to spend time with you.

What's the budget? Who pays for whatever I come up with? My budget is limited, but as I said, I am willing to stretch myself. I want to have a wonderful year. Let's talk.

You're like, old. Would you be up for what I have in mind? Are you up for doing a class of pole dancing/circus silks? I am in reasonable health and try to keep fit. I have a little arthritis in one hand, but that's about it.

What sorts of things do you do already? I like to read and study languages. I do digital collage. I like theater and concerts. I like most kinds of foods. I tend to find something I like and keep doing them over and over again. Help me get out of my rut! Will consider your proposal, but I reserve to right to reject ideas I consider too dangerous. I am not going to learn how to ride a motorcycle standing on my head.

The response to this message so far has been great. I've been invited to go turkey hunting, tour the state capitol, do a volunteer stint planting trees, learn how to make pysanky eggs, spend an afternoon at a farm baling hay, do tabletop D&D gaming, learn how to cook an Indian dish, go out dancing, and more. Other plans are also in the works. If you're interested in joining the challenge, too, drop me a comment.

Image description: Background: inflated balloons in various colors. Center: Peg, smiling. Lower center: Peg's family, gathered around a table for her birthday luncheon, with a decorated birthday cake. Upper center: a vase full of tulips, with a wooden disk superimposed over it with the words "Oh the places you'll go."

Year of Adventure



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

This month I will be celebrating a very particular birthday. With my new health insurance, I am now eligible for a program that enables me to go back to the YWCA.

I am absolutely overjoyed about this. I had to give up my Y membership when my job was cut in half with the pandemic, five years ago, and I've missed it dreadfully. I dug my Y membership card out of a drawer (I even had an old towel card that still had some punches left on it) and presented myself at the Y membership desk with my new Silver Sneakers number and was duly reinstated.

Now I regularly use the treadmill, rowing machine, weight machines, and especially—oh joy—the sauna. I am sore, because I have not been diligent as I should about using weights, but I am determined to do so now.

This is definitely one perk that has come with growing older.

Background: a sauna. Underneath the sauna light are the words "Eliminating racism, empowering women, YWCA. In front of the sauna bench is a rowing machine. Hand weights rest on the sauna bench. Lower center: A silver sneaker.

Silver Sneakers



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

I like coffee. No, I love it.

I was thinking this week that not only do I drink it every day, but it is also a common element in almost all of my most important social interactions. I get together regularly to walk with a couple of friends each week, and we always follow our walk by buying coffee together (lately, I've been adding a half shot of lavender syrup to mine). I get together regularly with my mom and sisters for coffee and scones. Every Friday, I get together remotely with several writing friends--we originally met in a coffee shop until the pandemic. Eric and I usually meet on Saturday mornings at my house for coffee and pastries. (He uses the Brontë mug and I use the Jane Austen mug). I have taught him all about the delight of adding molasses to enrich the flavor.

I didn't drink coffee until I was in my thirties, but teaching writing composition at the University to hungover freshman at 8:00 am made it eventually seem necessary.

Oddly enough, neither Delia nor Fiona ever developed a taste for it. I would love to go out for coffee with them, but we have to console ourselves with brunch instead.

Against a semi-transparent background of coffee beans, a smiling woman (Peg) holds a cup of coffee. Bottom: two coffee mugs (Jane Austen mug and Brontë mug), with a sprig of lavender. Lower left: a jar of molasses. Upper left corner: a latte with latte art in the foam and a scone with jam and clotted cream.

Coffee



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

This has been one of those weeks where it has been a bit difficult to pin down exactly what the week has been about. What has been top of mind? I didn't have anything particularly extraordinary happen. (For St. Patrick's day, I made mashed potatoes laced with corned beef and cheese. Whatever).

I realized that I have been fighting a slight strain of melancholy and I put it down to the fact that I have been pushing forward with the decluttering/Swedish Death Cleaning. I am continuing to go through Rob's stuff (OMG, after eight seven years, aren't I done YET? But no, I am STILL pulling legal files out of the garage).

Going through Rob's stuff will never stop being painful. I am confronted by memories with every box I open, every piece of paper I reread. God, oh how I wish he had not stuck me with this burden. It feels like being trapped in the past. My sense of time gets hosed up when I am doing these tasks. I am about to turn 65. I am on the brink of retirement, and could conceivably figure that I am 2/3 through this life or more. Yet each box lands me firmly back in the past. And that is both intoxicating and so very painful.

Going through his things, thinking about the house, continually rubs my nose in the fact that this house used to be for a family. I lived with other people I loved. I ate meals together with them. I celebrated holidays with them. But now I live alone and it feels so wrong. When I get together with my siblings (whom I dearly love), I enjoy spending time with them, don't get me wrong. But they are all married, and I feel that difference in our situations so keenly. They are all with the partners with whom they have spent years, with whom they had children. And the ghost of Rob beside me is like a phantom limb, aching with pain.

Yes, I am keeping company with Eric, and yes, I love him and we are committed to each other. But there are very good reasons why we are not living together, why we will probably never have the deep history together that my siblings have with their spouses--someone with whom they have lived with for decades, someone with whom they have had children. The history I had with Rob.

I don't want to spend the rest of my life with my neck cranked over my shoulder, looking back longingly at the past. I feel so acutely the empty parts of my life here in the present.

I want to look forward toward the future. And yet I recognize that my future is an increasingly smaller and smaller portion of my life. Yes, I do know that there are things I can still anticipate with pleasure. I am, after all, welcoming my first grandchild this June.

But when I am going through Rob's boxes, the collision of past, present, and future is uncomfortable and painful.

God, being a widow just sucks.

Image description: A view of a range of mountains. Lower center: a bright spot at the confluence where one slopes down as the other slopes up. The downslope is labeled 'Past,' the slope behind the bright spot is 'Present' and the upslope leading away is 'Future.' An arrow points to the bright spot with the text 'You are here.'


Past, Present, and Future



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

I noticed that my backup drive was continually failing to back up. After monkeying around with it for awhile, I took the drive and laptop into Best Buy, where they diagnosed the problem: I had waaaaaaaaay too many files on my computer.

Oh.

So I started culling files and music off the computer. It was both unnerving and satisfying, but I managed to kill several gigabytes worth of data, which meant I got the automatic backups going again.

Inspired by this, I attacked several other sources of clutter. I emptied several more boxes of legal files left in the garage by Rob (no, I'm still not done going through them). I took a box of hardback mysteries to Half-Price Books (only got $5.00 for them, but at least thirty more books are out of the house). I culled through my closet and took some bags of clothes to a thrift store (I took particular grim satisfaction in stuffing a sweater Kij had given me into the garbage bag. Why had I kept it so long? I have no idea).

I still have much too much stuff. But this week, at least, I beat it back. At least a little.

The design shows some of the things I cleared out this week. I overlaid those images with a scythe, both to indicate cutting things out of my life and as a veiled reference to the concept of Swedish Death Cleaning.

Lower center: A half-open laptop. Directly above: hanging files. Above that: stacks of books. Above that, stacks of clothes on shelves. Overlaid over all: a scythe.

Decluttering



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

We are past Candlemas and into the second half of winter. This is the period in Minnesota when people get restless, thinking, 'I gotta get out of my house and go somewhere to forget the way the cold is sinking into my bones.'

This past weekend, I went to two places to accomplish this.

The first was the St. Paul Como Park to visit the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory. This is a traditional place that Minnesotans go to escape and bask in semi-tropical air that involves less money than a plane ticket to Florida. Eric and I went on Saturday, and although the sunken garden was between the two biggest flower shows (the holiday poinsettia display and the spring bulb display) the garden was entirely satisfactory:



Eric and I also visited the fern room, the North garden, and the bonsai collection. The air was lush and moistly tropical, and it was easy to forget that winter was still brooding beyond the glass doors outside.

The next day, I went to wander around the Minneapolis Art Institute by myself. They were having events for Valentine's Day weekend, and one thing highlighted was the collection of ice sculptures in the museum courtyard, copies of some of the favorite pieces of art inside the museum. The sky was cloudlessly blue that day, making the ice sculptures shimmer with brilliant light.



So I combined these two experiences into one collage. I went looking for a word for the post-candlemas portion of winter and ran across a particularly rare and obscure winter word: apricity, which means “the warmth of the sun in the winter.” The word comes from the Latin aprīcāri, “to bask in the sun.” The word largely fell out of use by the end of the 19th century, but it has seen an uptick in recent years in branding and marketing.

A ice sculpture of a man's torso stands in a formal garden (the St. Paul Como Conservatory). Lower foreground: variegated dark green leaves with stripes of fainter green. Behind the statue is a bonsai'd azalea tree. Behind that are colorful flowers, including orchids, which frame the ice sculpture.

Apricity



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.