So much happening here and it changes from hour to hour and day to day. Minneapolis and Minnesota are all over the headlines and opening my email to the journalists’ newsletters I subscribe to or perusing the reporting of pretty much any news site is disconcerting. I’m reading echoes. Foreign news agencies have sent their war correspondents. There was a Danish film crew at my weekly neighborhood protest.

We Minnesotans tend to be a modest sort of people. When food is on offer, there will always be one last serving that no one eats because it would not be polite in case someone else might want or need it more. We are also known for apologizing to inanimate objects when we bump into them. I have actually apologized to a table, Ope! Sorry!

We have separation issues. It takes half an hour or longer to say goodbye. First you suggest that you will be leaving in a few minutes. Ten or fifteen minutes later, you actually make a move for the door. Depending on the season, it will take another 10-15 minutes to get ready to go out the door. Then you walk out onto the porch and the host follows and you spend another 10 minutes or so talking. Then you walk to your car or down to the sidewalk and the host follows you and you spend another 10 minutes or so before you finally, actually depart.

If you are ever talking with someone from Minnesota and they respond with, “that’s interesting,” it means they 100% disagree with you and think what you just said is incredibly ignorant or ridiculous. But they don’t want to argue with you about it because arguing is not very nice, especially if you are a guest in someone’s home or you are eating out with them and your dinner was just served and you have to get through the entire meal before you can spend 30 minutes saying goodbye.

We don’t like being in the spotlight. But more than that, we don’t like being told what to do and we don’t like anyone coming into our city and messing things up and hauling away the neighbor who has taken care of our pets while we were away and snow blowed our sidewalk just because, or the cook at our favorite little eat spot who always puts a special something into what we are getting because we helped dig them out of the snow or fished next to them for hours at the nearby lake or bought 5 candy bars we didn’t want from their kid who was selling them to raise money for a school field trip.

We don’t want to be in the news. We don’t want to be an example of peaceful resistance. And while we are greatly flattered and touched by the editors of The Nation nominating Minneapolis for a Nobel Peace Prize, we don’t think we deserve something like that because what we are doing here is just taking care of each other like we always do.

The Occupation

Contrary to Tom Homan and President Trump saying they would withdraw Federal agents, they have not. Today Homan promised to withdraw 700 agents immediately from the state. Even if 700 agents leave, there are still 2,300 remaining. They will continue to occupy my city and violate our constitutional rights with impunity. What you see and hear in the news is only the tip of the proverbial ICEberg.

My neighborhood is a backdoor entry for ICE and DHS agents wishing to avoid the protest crowds outside the Whipple building where their operations are based. They leave Federal property and drive, often recklessly, into my neighborhood looking for folks to detain, staking out houses, circling schools, threatening observers, as well as passing through to other parts of the city.

Because we are first to see the vehicles heading out on the road, observer patrols are active, reporting vehicles to citizen dispatch teams who then spread the word to other neighborhoods. Agents are aware they are being watched. They keep changing tactics to try and blend in or avoid being tracked. They change the license plates on their vehicles, use commercial and limo plates, use tape to change the numbers and letters on the plates, or drive with no plates at all. They are also putting sports team bumper stickers on their cars, stuffies on their dashboards, and increasingly driving sedans and minivans instead of SUVs. Sometimes they even drive trucks with company logos on them, pretending to be plumbers or electricians or delivery drivers.

They are using surveillance tech to hack and track phones. And have started using drones.

There are protests here every single day. I have attended so many community meetings and trainings with acronyms for all the things that I can’t keep it all straight.

This is where I live now. My once bustling city with its thriving small businesses and restaurants is now occupied by people with guns, tear gas, flash grenades, and giant canisters of pepper spray. Businesses are closing, students are staying home from school, people are afraid to leave their homes. Wired has an excellent article about how ICE has affected normal life here. Lit Hub has also been publishing a series of Letters from Minnesota that are very good.

The invaders have murdered two people. They point their guns at bystanders and threaten whoever they want to. They drive by folks peacefully protesting and spray them in the face with pepper spray. They push people to the ground and then accuse them of obstruction. They block in people legally following them in their cars on the street and then detain them for impeding law enforcement. They lie about everything. The lies are so egregious, the state has a webpage to correct all of the misinformation.

Nothing here is normal anymore, though there are plenty of people who behave as though it is; plenty of people who have no problem with what ICE is doing. But there are more of us who are out on the streets, more of us who are involved in mutual aid, more of us who are resisting any way we can.

And while things are grim here, there are plenty of moments of fun, absurdity, and beauty. There was a protest at the Whipple building where everyone wore costumes. We regularly have singing protests. The Saturday night following the murder of Alex Pretti there were candlelight vigils and walks throughout the city. My neighborhood and two others walked to a central meeting point and then went to together to a bridge over the nearby freeway. There were well over a hundred people there.

And this is what happened on Lake Nokomis, a few blocks from my house:

The letters are 100 feet in size, made from snow, and lit with candles. It is visible to the planes flying in and out of the nearby airport.

And then there is Smitten Kitten, a local feminist sex shop that has become a hub of mutual aid activities. They showed up at a protest with a big box of dildos to hand out to people. I laughed myself silly at their telling of the story and the photos of people with dildos affixed to their helmets.

There was a drum protest Monday as I was biking home from work. It was head bobbing, toe tapping fun with the sound amplified because of the tall buildings downtown.

There is joy in resistance, solidarity, and mutual aid. There is meaning in simply being a good neighbor.

Occupations, Other

Amidst everything I still have to go about the business of living. The arctic cold has finally lifted and it’s just regular winter cold.

My bathroom remodel is finally, finally done. We love the results. Eventually we will paint the walls, put up a different mirror, get a new shower curtain, and make a new window curtain. These things are a little lower on the priority list at the moment, but they will happen in the next few months.

Last weekend I did some winter sowing of prairie seeds that need a cold period in order to sprout. This was just before temperatures plunged to subzero F for a week, so they are definitely getting some cold. They are all in containers on my deck at the moment. Last year I had just written what I had sown in marker on the container or on a wooden popsicle stick stuck in the container. By spring the weather had worn it all away and I had to guess what was sprouting in each container. This year I wrote on the container and then put a piece of clear tape over it. We’ll see in a few months if that worked. Heh.

I made whole wheat sourdough bagels with zaatar spice topping. James has been making some delicious sandwiches with them. James has also been making tasty soups and stews from various pantry ingredients. We have been eating flax-spelt sourdough bread that I made with the soup.

We’re working on a jigsaw puzzle in the brief I-have-a-few-minutes moments when there is not time to sit down and do anything before you need to do something else or leave the house for work or a meeting.

I read James by Percival Everett—so good! Now I am reading Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin which I heard about on Between the Covers, and is delightfully strange. I am also reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, a book I have been meaning to read for ages. Fungi are so freaking amazing y’all! And there is poetry by June Jordan and New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe.

James and I celebrated Imbolc. For us it is the promise of spring and the season of letting go of what no longer serves us. We have a ritual in which we write down on a piece of paper the non-physical thing we want to let go of and then we bundle up and stand in the snow in the garden and light our paper on fire. It’s quite satisfying. Indoors, we mark the occasion by opening a jar of jam. In the past it has been dandelion jelly, but last year we decided that the tedious picking of dandelions and then the even more tedious removal of the petals to make the jam was too much work for too little results. So I saved a jar of rose petal jam for this year.

Opening the jar to the soft smell of roses was delightful. And now for the next week or so we get to eat roses on our toast and pancakes. If that doesn’t invoke the promise of warmth and sunshine and green and flowers, then I don’t know what else could.

My apologies for not keeping up with blogs or replying to comments here. It has taken me five days just to write and post this. Most days it is all I can do to just keep up with the required dailiness and community goings on. I long for slow, dull days!

For your musical entertainment, here is Bruce Springsteen’s Minneapolis protest song. He says he wrote it in a night, and well, yeah. I appreciate the effort but it’s not going to win any awards, that’s for sure. He did make a surprise appearance in Minneapolis over the last weekend for a fundraising concert at First Avenue, which is really cool.