Articles written by Janet Kurtz
Best Laid Plans (Organ Recital 101)
A Sunday in late June, anticipated since the dark, icy days of January, finally arrived with the blue skies and green grass expected of such a day in Minnesota. The enthusiastic committee members had spent …
June Wedding – a la mejicana
A thunderstorm roared through this morning, knocking out the electricity, uprooting a dozen trees, and producing excellent mosquito hatch conditions. This is exactly the type of morning you don’t want to wake up to if …
Spring Melts
Life is returning to my tundra. Like old friends, the cooing of the mourning dove greets me, mixed with the peenting of the snipe on my walks down gravel roads. Robins land on the overhead …
Culture Shock: Quarantine to Disney
It was a trip planned for spring 2020, before the world closed down abruptly, cancelling plans from visiting elder family members to foreign forays. The plan was hatched before humans hunkered down inside their homes, …
March On: A People’s Journey through Time
The snow rose in piles over the edge of the hill before sloping down to the frozen Mississippi River. We snowshoed along a narrow path left from those who went before us this winter, stopping …
The Enchantment of ENCANTO
Early February morning pinks and lavenders outline the clouds in the eastern sky before exposing a tree line, then the frozen garden, and snowshoe paths to the woodshed. My winter eyes are used to a …
Braiding Sweetgrass
Braiding Sweetgrass is a book making the rounds these days with good reason. Author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes poetically from her spirit and theoretically, as a scientist. She is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of …
La Acostada and La Levantada
Dusk fell on the houses in thebarrio situated near Saltillo’s center. Christmas lights were hung on the artificial pine in the sala and draped across the fireplace mantel in the home where I was staying. …
Thanksgiving: Changing Perspectives
I am a person of the north – a four season type of person. Last month, I was enjoying the extended fall of glorious color changes, honking geese, putting the garden to bed, and unusually …