Relative Something

The other day I was hunting for the U of MN site that offered access to a library of historic aerial images and found several different views of the farm my grandfather bought back in the early 1950s. (https://apps.lib.umn.edu/mhapo/) That property was called “Intervale Ranch” and the name became the inspiration for our choosing “Wintervale” for the land where Cyndie and I now live.

My family was living there when I was born in 1959. The farming was mostly done by then and the barns and nearby surroundings became a large playground for my siblings and me. 

Looking at the various images I found of that land has thrown me back into years I recall fondly. The weather I experienced for the first ten years of my life seemed like a reliable and relatively consistent pattern of seasonal transitions. For all I knew, that’s the way it had always been and would always be.

Hah! Ten years out of the incomprehensible span of time from the forming of planets to the human-influenced environment of Earth we are experiencing today. I expect the naiveté of youth is why that time of my life seems so envious now.

In the most recent ten years we have experienced increasing instances of rainfall during winter months (instead of snow) to the extent it is no longer a bizarre occasion.

I was also thrown back to fond memories of the media commonly on in our home. There were a mere five channels of broadcast television to watch. Walter Cronkite on the national news. Dave Moore on the local station. Boone & Erickson on the radio. If you wanted to know if school was closed due to a snowstorm, you listened to WCCO radio. After they gave the ag reports, they’d read the alphabetical list of communities with school districts that were closed or running two hours late.

On my transistor radio in my bedroom I would tune in KDWB or WDGY to hear the latest hits of popular music.

We moved from the house on that property to a neighborhood of around twenty houses when I was ten years old. It was my first exposure to the fact that the world wasn’t as static my young perspective believed.

Slowly, but surely, television changed, personalities came and went, and I grew into my teenage angst.

In a way, nothing holds a candle to the first ten years of my life for the bliss of being surrounded by my family on the remnants of that farm near the border of Eden Prairie and Edina in Hennepin County, Minnesota, U.S.A.

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