Minnesota state outline made of words

The snow came sideways off Lake Superior on Tuesday, and by Wednesday the drifts had swallowed the bottom step of the Ruby Pine. We have six guests stranded: a surveyor from Duluth who keeps measuring the ceiling, a flour man who will not stop talking about the mill on the river, and a widow who asks for the same room every January. Nobody leaves until the county plough reaches the Mille Lacs road, so I have been feeding everyone twice a day and counting the tins in the cellar.

Last night the power dipped and the guest book fell open on the reception desk. You know the one, with the pages of names going back to Grandmother's time. I read the towns people wrote beside their names, and I thought of your postcard from the Stone Arch Bridge, the one that said "every place I have ever been is in this state." You were always showing off.

So I took a pencil and began on the back of the flour man's receipt, writing down everything I could think of: Minnehaha Falls, Lake Minnetonka, Duluth, Ten Thousand Lakes, the Mississippi, Grandmother's clothesline, the creamery at Little Falls. By midnight the receipt would not hold them. I tore a sheet from the spare pages and kept going, the lines tilting where the wind pushed at the glass, until the whole boot shape stood on the paper, dense and black, the way you drew it for me the summer you left.

The plough came at six. The surveyor folded the sheet and put it in his coat without a word. I suppose he will pin it up somewhere in Duluth, and nobody there will know who wrote it.

Love, Ingrid