a beautiful campaign

(an Italian Sonnet)

“I think you are a beautiful campaign,”
he said to us, this boy from Italy,
as we explained how we had come to be—
an Italian, German, and American,
three girls who’d met as students on exchange

and under an Australian sun had schemed
to trade goodbye for the next lazy season,
our plan traced eagerly into the sand.

We fashioned a collective map of homes
and homes away from homes with open doors
connected by a path to be explored.
First marks on where we’d soon return alone:
a city, small for Germany, near Koln,
a farm on shores of Lake Superior,
a white Stucco in Brecsia, (north of Florence).
Then Lisbon, Canada, Sicily, Rome...

Land circled. Money saved, to execute.
We named our first adventure with a date
and talked of it so often it became
a mantra: Summer 2002.
That summer we would meet in Bonn and prove
the smallness of the world by conquering
Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, Italia

(at least the north), and Salzburg too.

He said campaign and we assumed he meant
“a company,” or group, not like the sort
of military term once used in France,
translated “open country”: Armies spent
the winter in the comfort of their quarters
and in the summer took to the campagne.

mapping minneapolis

I’d wanted a good map of the cities for awhile. “The Cities” are the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Growing up, my family would make weekend trips down to the cities from our farm in rural northern Wisconsin. We would usually stay with the Beyer’s. Bill was my dad’s best friend from college. His family lived in a little stucco house on a fairly quiet street in St. Paul, just a few blocks away from the Lutheran Seminary my dad had entered after college and subsequently dropped out of. This is the piece of the cities I know best—the soft blues and cream of their combined living room and dining room, the little wooden bench that my mom and I would share pulled up to one end of dining room table, the bread and cheese and wine at every meal, the little staircase leading down to the basement a multi-purpose guest room slash t.v. room slash office slash library with bookshelves living every wall and big red cushions that could fold into couches or be pulled to create beds on the floor.

I can also remember the apartment where my older brother Chris and his wife Honey lived for three years, furnished with a lot of the same furniture they have now, but cramped into two bedrooms. I vaguely remember the two other apartments he lived in with friends before he and Honey got together and the dorm room he had at the U where I got high for the first time.

When we drive in the cities, there are bits of familiarity—the water tower near Beyer’s that marks St. Anthony park, the neighborhood my parent’s lived in when they were first married, and where my mom’s parent’s had lived when returned from eighteen years of missionary work in Papua New Guinea, the white pillow of the metro dome breaking up the skyline, the two towers of square apartment buildings with squares of primary colors where it seems there should be windows, another architectural experiment filled with poor people, I remember being told, the flashing pink sign for the Gay 90s that marked the existence of gay people, even though I later learned it wasn’t actually that gay.

More recently, I have traveled up to the cites from Chicago with my girlfriend Sarah. Her parents live thirty miles west of the cities, where farmland blends into suburbia. We drive into the city to meet up with her sister or friends from high school. We mainly hang out in uptown. From the dreadlocks and tattoos and mismatched clothes sported by the people on the street and filling the bars, I imagine it’s the Greenwich Village of the cites, although I’ve never actually been to Greenwich, just seen it described in books and movies.

Just two months ago, Cory, my best friend from high school, moved to Minneapolis. We talk on the phone and she tells me of the coffee shops she frequents and the bike ride she has started to take every night to the lake to sit and write and think.

The cities exist in my head only in pieces. A house, an apartment, a storefront, a story from my Grandma Dale that she would walk everyday from the hospital where she was in nursing school to the lake to swim. But I don’t know where the hospital is and I don’t know in what direction she had to walk to get to the lake. Unlike Bayfield, surrounded by Lake Superior, and Chicago, pushed up against Lake Michigan, the Twin Cities don’t have one huge body of water to rest against. Instead there is a river that snakes through the cites and over a dozen small lakes scattered through out.

Last Friday I rode up to the cities with Sarah in her beat up little teal green car. I told her, if we cut over into Minnesota at LaCrosse instead of taking the interstate, we can drive up along the river. Our little detour made the trip almost two hours longer, but it was one I would take again. There was something about following the flow of water instead of the flow of traffic that felt right. Even though I knew I couldn’t trust the river to run in a straight direction, I knew that this river cut through the cities, and following it would take us there.

A day later, after getting drinks with Sarah’s oldest sister Vic, sleeping in at her parent’s house, and then coming back into town to buy a bike map and split a pizza, Sarah dropped me off at the airport. I flew back to Chicago, leaving Sarah and her car behind. Ever since we had started dating, just over a year ago, I had known that Sarah would be moving back. She had done her undergrad in Chicago and then stayed on an extra year when she was invited into a MBA program. She had been counting the days until she could leave the big city for her smaller one before we had even met.

I took the map out this morning. I laid it on the floor. I stared at it, attempting to commit it to memory, starting with the blue line of the river and blobs of the lakes. I took out my address book. I wrote down the address for Beyer’s and the Chris and Honey’s old address. I texted Cory and asked her what her address was. I wrote down other places I wanted to look up: Bryant Lake Bowl, Northwestern Hospital, Luther Seminary. Then I went online to Google maps. I typed in an address or business name and it would bring up the map, a green arrow marking where two families sat around the table and passed a bowl of pasta, where Chris and I played darts on the porch and drank Apricot Ale, where Cory and I lay on navy blue sheets and dreamed about our futures, where Sarah and I kissed on the New Year, where Grandma Dale learned to check for a pulse, where my Dad had given up on the church. One by one I committed each intersection to memory and then returned to the map on the floor with a brown marker, drawing an X and a name.

I imagine Cory’s bike ride to the lake. I imagine Grandma’s walk to the same lake. I note that uptown is actually south of downtown. Everything makes more sense. I’m eager to make more Xs by digging up the old addresses of apartments and houses where my family has lived. I’m curious about the future, the Xs for homes that have yet to be discovered.