My Grandmother's Trunk

This steamer trunk has been sitting in our house for years. It was my grandmother’s. It’s the trunk in which she carried all of her belongings when she emigrated from what was then Austria-Hungary, and later Czechoslovakia, and now Slovakia. She was 18 at the time and according to the story that she told time and again in her senility had been working as a nurse girl in Vienna to earn money for passage to America. Regrettably, that’s all I know. If I went to Ellis Island I would probably see a well lighted museum exhibit containing a trunk just like this one surrounded by clothing, documents, and personal items. There were tens of thousands of trunks that came to America from Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century. This trunk was one of them.

It’s only steerage quality I suspect, covered with sheets of black tin and slats of wood. The tin is dented and creased, and the wood is stained and dark with age. The corners are coarse and the edges rough. On the front, there’s a rectangular centerpiece, also tin but natural not black. It’s stamped with a pattern of overlapping flowers obscured by stains and scuffs accumulated over many years and many miles. The centerpiece surrounds a brass lock, strong enough to deter only the least determined thief. On each side of the trunk, there were handles once. The leather straps broke years ago, leaving nothing but metal brackets. It took two people to move this trunk. One of them was my grandmother. I never asked who the other was. I never asked how the trunk got from Vienna to Chicago, much less why. I never asked, but then she never told me either.

I place a hand on each side of the trunk’s arched lid. I open the trunk. The air that rises is old. It smells like the attic in my grandmother’s house.

What the Buddha said

I have the power to liberate myself from all bondage through my own personal effort and intelligence

River Falls

The making of the earth seems more recent here. The rain and sleet here blow across a continent and race over glacial lakes. Streams, brown with iron, tumble to the lake through lava that seems just now cool. A moment ago this land was the Northwest Territory. I have lived for nearly a third of that time.

Here, at least the names remain: Minnesota, Minnetonka, Minneapolis, the difference between the French and the Spanish.

In a picture hanging on a gray wall in a diner in Duluth, the Edmund Fitzgerald steams across Lake Superior from the ore fields of Minnesota to the smelters on the shores of Lake Michigan. The photograph was taken long before the ship became a legend in suburban America. The Process, the mines, the conveyors, the steamers, now that it doesn’t end in Chicago where does it end?

At 6:00 on a Saturday night in Minnesota, it is cold and grey. It snowed the night before even though it's the first week of May. It is getting dark and the air is thick with Garrison Keeler and the Prairie Home Companion.

A pair of eagles glides over the sandstone crags at the confluence of the Kinnickinick and the Saint Croix rivers.