Pam and Heather's excellent adventure

Every May for the past few years, your scrapblog editor and her trusty hiking pal Heather M. have bushwhacked through the woods admiring the forest-floor scenery, wiping out in the mud and scaring the deer without ever finding even one morel mushroom. That all changed yesterday when we found 72 of the preciousssss fungi in three top-secret locations. Some snapshots:

Oh yeah! We score!

Our first site yielded a pillowful.

One of scores of morels Heather found.
 The little buggers aren't easy to see; Heather, who has a careful photographer's eye, was better at spotting them than I was.

More and more morels!

The spring woods are full of many lovely things beyond morels. Heather took this photo of a fern.
 

 We also stopped to admire the lilacs on my Old Frontenac property, which may or may not be near the morel lode.

Someday I'll live on this land and be able to enjoy the lilacs every May day instead of having to drive so far to visit them.

The sweet scent of spring.

We also stopped at the Old Frontenac beach. The water was quite high, but not as high as it's been this spring, as you can tell from the water lines on the big cottonwoods.

Heather's fine photographer's eye caught a lot of beauty everywhere, including on the beach. In addition to our morels, we brought home a deer skull, a deer pelvic bone, a fox jawbone, and a lot of pretty driftwood and rocks we found on our various ramblings. As we said to each other, it's just like one of those fun adventures you have when you're a kid!

A visit from cousin Chatsies

Cousin the Rev. Dr. Mary Catherine "Chats" Miller Northrup, aka sister of Pam and Chris, was in Minneapolis for a conference this week and was able to sneak away for a couple visits with her siblings and their kids. A few snapshots from our Tuesday night get-together: Big sis, little sis.

Chats read "Go Dog Go" and "Green Eggs and Ham" to nieces Elizabeth, 7, and Avamarie, 2, or maybe it was the other way around.

Naturally, several Millers played a hot game of Memory, this one on a beautiful sunny evening in my Robbinsdale yard. Needless to say, Elizabeth won, big-time.

Noah basked in the lovely springtime sunshine and his happiness at having graduated this week from the University of Minnesota. The world is his oyster!

"Why, yes," Avamarie opined to her dad, Chris Miller, at our picnic, "I would like to steal your watermelon. It even matches my outfit!"

Avamarie got a push from dad Chris at our Robbinsdale playground, a favorite walk destination. Noah grew up playing here.

Lovely and talented Moriah, home for the summer from Mankato State, has an ailing tendon that is healing in one of those fashionable leg boots. It didn't stop her from doing graceful, athletic things.

Cousins Noah and Moriah got ready ...

... got set, and ...

... Mo went flying! ...

... and so did Noah, whoa! All in all, it was a lovely evening.

A momentous day for Noah and his parents

On Sunday (May 15, 2011), Noah graduated from the University of Minnesota with a major in political science and a minor in philosophy. His dad and I are very proud of him, and it was a happy day for all of us. Noah outside Mariucci Arena after the ceremony with me and his dad, Steve Johnson.

Noah with his parents in Robbinsdale; we took him out to dinner at an Italian restaurant and toasted this wonderful day.

Noah with his dad and his stepmom, Ann Johnson.

*****

I found the graduation ceremony very emotional and meaningful. Despite the fact that there were more than 2,000 graduates from the College of Liberal Arts and the whole thing could have been very unwieldy, it was well organized, with beautiful live music and excellent, thoughtful speeches. The keynote speaker was poet Michael Dennis Browne, who read poems by himself, N. Scott Momaday and this one by Marge Piercy. which is one of my favorites -- "To Be of Use":

TO BE OF USE

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who stand in the line and haul in their places,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

-- Marge Piercy

Up north for a couple of days

Occasionally your scrapblog editor gets tired of her noisy job, what with its incessant police scanner and arguing reporters, and likes to get outta town on her days off. Usually, that's to lovely Lake City, Minn., our ancestral hamlet. But this past week, the yen to go north, rather than south, struck, and I spent my midweek days off at Gooseberry Cabins, one of two mom-and-pop cabin resorts on the North Shore (the other being Castle Haven) where three generations of cousins have spent time through the years. Enjoyed two days of hiking in still wintry woods (snow still lay in the ravines, and very few wildflowers were out yet, but the lack of leaves allowed for great visibility in the woods; saw lots of birds and deer). Read three books, cooked some nice experimental meals, drank a little merlot and generally got the blood pressure down for the plunge back into the urban world of work and cacophony. A few snapshots: Squinting out at the great lake. I kept thinking about how I lived in Duluth for eight years, and though I appreciated Lake Superior then, I'm not sure I appreciated it enough. Now, seen so infrequently, it seems extra magnificent, rare, exotic, magical. I recently had the privilege to review a novel by a Duluthian who has the same feeling about the lake, and the talent to translate it into exceptional fiction. Highly recommended -- Danielle Sosin's "Long Shining Waters." Gooseberry Falls was thunderous, thick with water from recent rains and snowmelt. Better yet, there was almost nobody there. I highly recommend visiting the North Shore before Memorial Day. The great lake as seen from the front of my little Gooseberry Cabin. (Gooseberry Cabins is northeast of Castle Danger, right on the lake, run by Karen and Tim Erickson, as it has been for decades.)

Walked a couple times a day down the gravel road to Hwy. 61, then back into Castle Haven, the neighboring resort where we more often stayed as kids. Castle Haven is still a cool place, but it's been upgraded and is more expensive and fancier now than Gooseberry Cabins, which have kept their 1950s feel -- no TVs, phones, just simple cabins right on the rocks. Stilll, it was fun to walk around Castle Haven, see the old fishhouse where the long-deceased Lind siblings, Edgar, Mark and Florence, once worked, and remember happy family times there.

I stayed in one unit of the Gooseberry Cabins "tricabin." No one else was there on my weekday days off, so it was utterly quiet and deserted. Perfect for a city gal's getaway.

The woods next to my cabin.

Headed for sun country

Congrats to cousin Chats, my sis, the Rev. Dr. Mary Catherine Miller Northrup, esq., and hubby Michael Northrup! Cathy has landed a new pastorship near Scottsdale, Ariz., a place she and Michael have considered a great destination for a long time. Come Aug. 1, Cathy will be senior pastor of Rio Verde Community Church, soon to be renamed Community Church of the Verdes. Chats reports that it's an interdenominational church that serves three over-55 communities, Rio Verde, Tonto Verde and Vista Verde, which include a lot of expat Minnesotans; the building also serves a Roman Catholic congregation. Cathy will remain a Presbyterian minister. Cathy and Michael plan to live in Rio Verde. Cathy wrote this to her congregation at First Presbyterian in Wichita, Kan., which she has served for more than five years: "Know that I will keep First Presbyterian in my prayers, and I will always hold it, and you, in my heart."

Boys to young men

The Broberg boys are growing up fast -- tall, handsome, talented. A couple of snapshots forwarded by proud dad Dan:

Nick with his lovely prom date.

Marty, playing for Hopkins, outruns the competition in a rugby game against Burnsville. Need I say they won? Hopkins won, 17-3. This fine action photo is from the Hopkins community newspaper. A nice Edina Patch interview with Marty and his team can be found here.

Nancy Sprick Kohrs, a regular blog reader, kindly emailed us this 1973 photo of Dad early in his time with the Goodhue County (Minn.) Auditor's Office, before he himself was elected county auditor. Front row: Ardis Kohrs (Nancy's mother-in-law), Millie Sanvidge, Hazel Johnson and Marion Mincieli; one woman's name is missing here; will check with Nancy on that. Back row: Bob Hendel, Dad (William Alton Miller, 4/13/25-3/1/96), Russ Tanner (then auditor) and Larry Peterson. To make the photo larger and easier to view, just click on it.