So, I need to start with a lovely cartoon that I found this morning and shared on Facebook with the caption, "Me, in Midway."



Image: Cartoon of a grackle (a brown bodied bird with blue head) realizing that their ugly neighborhood isn't, if you look closely at things.

I really love living in Saint Paul's Midway neighborhood most of the time. We have a really active community.

Our Buy Nothing group is beyond the Pale. I can wax lyrical about how I feel about the folks on that Facebook list, plus it's dead useful. Shawn and I just picked up a folding table that she was excited to find because it will be helpful to have immediately after her knee surgery. It was all bent-up on the bottom shelf, but I managed to spruce it up with two can's worth of spray paint. We may end up passing it back along once she's done with it, but that's the beauty of that group. 

I love that our neighborhood has actively adopted "the" possum as our neighborhood symbol. (There are many possums, we just call all of them The Midway Possum.) We track The Midway Possum on Facebook, share photos of her, make art, and write poems and haiku in her honor. 

The neighborhood has even organized volunteer garbage pick-up. We are an insanely busy neighborhood, with Snelling and University (and Fairview and highway 94) as part of our neighborhood. We have the Stadium and the light rail so we get lots and lots of people passing through, dropping garbage everywhere. This should be something that the city of St. Paul takes care of, but they don't, and no amount of haranguing will motivate them. So, every first Sunday of the month, a horde of Midway residents don safety vests, pickers, and garbage bags and collect literally hundreds of pounds of garbage. 

I know the names of my actual neighbors. The other day when I ran out of garlic powder, I was able to text several of my next door neighbors and get some! We watch each other's houses during vacations. We text when packages are misdelivered, etc. There are always tenants that we don't know in various apartments, but, come snowy weather, I'll likely learn their names when we all gather to help push someone out of a snowbank.

But, the neighborhood sometimes feels very ugly to me. I woke up this morning, threw open the windows to get a breath of fresh air, only to cough my lungs out because the air tasted and smelled of exhaust. When I want to go for a walk, I'm hemmed in by University a half a block to the north, Snelling to the east by about four blocks, the highway two blocks to the south, and Fairview a block and a half to the west. All those streets often so busy as to be unpassable (certainly the highway literally is). 

I do feel like the grackle in the first panel. Like, to find beauty, I need to go far.

Today, however, Shawn and I went for a walk and discovered several native gardens that have been planted all up and down our blocks. Moreover, someone has this magical, tiny garden. 


Image: Garden with carefully planted chicks and hens and Irish moss. 


Image: Tiny rock garden, continued. Moss roses and marigolds.

So, I am looking closely and finding beauty.

We've had a couple of nights of spectacular thunderstorms, so today started out very muggy and... MOIST.  It is eight-thirty in the evening and the humidity seems to have finally dropped. Previously, it was one of those days where you HAVE to wear shorts, but your thigh skin sticks to all the furniture. 

In a word: gross.

In fact, since it was so gross (and also, as it happened, pay day,) we decided to order take-away from our local Taiwanese hand-pulled noodle shop, Magic Noodle. It was delicious. I highly recommend it to anyone in the Twin Cities area. (https://www.yelp.com/biz/magic-noodle-saint-paul-4)

Also, Magic Noodle is one of the businesses in the epicenter of where the most destructive rioting was in Saint Paul, which is to say, about a half mile (0.8 km) from my house. It is still shocking to drive by the buildings that collapsed in the fires. A lot of the rubble that still remains, of course, are those establishments that had been owned by local, often first generation immigrant, PoC. Unlike Target, which has already reopened for business, they can't even afford the cost of hauling way the ruins of their former businesses. I do not say this to condemn rioting and looting as a legitimate form of protest, though if people reading this are unaware, a lot of the arson, specifically, has been directly linked to white agitators, several of whom have been arrested. (My friend naomikritzer has a good article about that, here: https://naomikritzer.com/2020/06/03/minneapolis-outside-agitators/.)  If people are interested in helping out African Immigrant Owned business both in my neighborhood and Minneapolis, there is an organization devoted to that which has a GoFundMe (although it looks like they surpassed their goal): https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/rebuild-african-immigrant-businesses

Mason has been continuing to volunteer, though the organization he's been working with is considering moving on. They closed their food give-away site last weekend, and instead packed up donations to go over to the homeless shelter that has sprung up in Minneapolis's Powderhorn Park after the homeless people were displaced from the Sheraton Hotel near (the former) Mid-Town Markets and Uncle Hugo's.  Mason isn't sure what he's going to do next. He'd like to stay in our neighborhood, since he likes the freedom of being able to walk to where he volunteers, but if these folks pack up for elsewhere... ? I told him I'd drive him anywhere in the city, but he's just not sure to where yet.

Of course, we could spend the rest of the summer teaching him how to drive, but that's a whole other can of worms. My driving teaching style consists of exceedingly constructive instruction such as, "AAAAAAHHHHHH!" and "OH MY GOD." Oh, don't forget my best advice, which was, "WE ARE GOING TO DIE."

So, he hasn't learned a lot yet.

Midway is quietly recovering, from what I can tell.

We are out in the streets every day with brooms and paint cans and, in Mason's case, bags of groceries. Yesterday, he spent the first couple of hours packing up food and the last couple helping people load up their cars. He was so cute when he came home, because he said to us, "You know what I learned today? Diapers come in sizes!" Shawn and I were like, "You're ahead of us. We only learned that sixteen years ago!" Because, seriously, both Shawn and I did stints as baby-sitters as kids, but there's so much you don't know until you have an infant in your house. I'm so glad that Mason is learning all this sort of stuff, especially as a young man.

I walked over to to my friend Theo's yesterday because they had painted me a protest sign at my request for me to put in my window.  There was ANOTHER charitable organization setting up a food give away at University and Fairview.  One of the women handing out stuff gave me a water bottle. She was a nice mom-type and when I said I wasn't in need, said, that I needed to hydrate. "It's hot, don't'ca know." 

They seem to be springing up everywhere, because, earlier, as I was coming back from picking up bagels, I saw yet another charity organization organizing a food/medical drive in the empty lot at Lexington and University. So, we are being inundated with help.

My coffee shop, Claddaugh, raised over two hundred dollars in tip jar money for Midway recovery, too. Their tip jar is going to a black artist organization today, I believe.

Meanwhile, in my garden the world continues to turn as though Minneapolis is not burning for justice. 


Image: thin-stalked blue irises in a boulevard garden (you can see the base of our street lamp.)

In the backyard, along the fence, the pink peony-transplanted years ago and so has gracefully agreed to be post-diva stage of transplanting--in bloom:

Image: peonies, still too heavy for their own beauty, flopped over in resplendent despondency.

Finally, specifically for rachelmanija , my orderly rows of radishes:

image: tiny sprouts in a row, nearly overwhelmed by tree detritus, including cottonwood fluff and maple tree 'helicopters.'

On that note, I shall leave you all with the hope of new life. There will be no peace without justice. We can rebuild.