Snow becomes our familiar.” That line from the poem “Knowing,” written by Falcon Heights poet Marilynn Thomas Walton, sums up the feelings here at the Bugle as January kept on going, plowing its way through March.
Shovels, ice and cold became our familiar.
But as we move into April, we know warm weather and that shimmery haze of green you see in the trees just before the buds burst into leaves will be here before you can say the word “transition.”
Transition is the thread running through this month’s Bugle. It’s the prompt we gave to writers who contributed to our third annual poetry contest this month (see the winning poems, including Walton’s “Knowing,” here). It’s the goal of District 12’s Energy Resilience Group, which has launched an ambitious community effort to find ways to move away from fossil-fuel dependence and become more reliant on community resources (see “Festival to showcase Transition Town effort”). And it’s happening as we say goodbye to longtime Bugle writer Anne Holzman and hello to Kyle Mianulli, who writes about transition at the Finnish Bistro here. Holzman has been contributing to the Bugle since 2002. She and her family are pulling up stakes and moving to a new part of the Twin Cities. Mianulli is a 2011 graduate from the University of Wisconsin’s journalism school and has been writing for the St. Anthony Park District 12 Community Council.
Keeping with the theme of transition (and our vexing winter), to The Birds, the bees and the butterflies to read naturalist Marcie O’Connor’s story about gardening with native plants and shares some warm green photos from her own efforts. Her photos will hasten your psychological transition into spring.
On another note
In 2012, the Bugle began the “Who Are We?” series of stories that looked at demographic changes to our communities from the 1970 U.S. Census to the latest Census in 2010. In November, Judy Woodward wrote about our voting habits in the 1970s and how the voting public had changed—a lot—since then. Woodward also wrote about families and marriage and how the definition of family is changing here (January 2013). The Bugle has been awarded a $2,000 Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Grant from the Minnesota Historical Society to continue that work, so stay tuned for more in-depth research and interesting stories that aim to answer the question, Who are we?
