Monday, September 6, 2010

The Drive Home

So, I started working in Red Wing a few weeks before I actually moved here. It's a solid hour's drive from downtown Minneapolis and the trip is quite lovely. Leaving HWY 61 ('sup Bob?) it's three miles to Prescott, WI. Ya take a right on 35 and once yer out of town, the route is a driving enthusiast's dream. There are plunging hills that plow into bullet-fast straightaways, gangs of fully developed and banked S-curves and just one cop, it seems, to patrol the entire county. The signal that you are near the next turn is... smelling something. It's warm and mushy. It's a wet dog in a wheat field, heating Dinty Moore on the stove-top, "...something is fermenting in here." kind of olfactory experience. Well one night a couple of weeks ago, I was in sniffing range of the place that produces the smell. When I reached It, the never seen before exterior lights were on. Nestle/Purina Company. The familiar checkerboard flag and block letter logo was a luminous targeted ad link, beckoning from the side-bar of some heavenly gmail home page. Cat food. I'm smelling a freshly made 2-acre sized can of warm cat food. By checking their website you can read that Nestle Purina Petcare Co. "...Manufactures Rodent food, Reptile food, Miscellaneous animal food, Animal feed, Livestock feed, Bird and fowl food, Fish food, Dog and Cat food." Mmmm. Mushy. And on a windy day, you don't even have to make the drive.

School is going swimmingly. We are two weeks along in our tools course and we are sharpening, honing, flattening and polishing our hearts out. It is maddening and tantalizing at once, like making diamonds. Because we know what we came to do! We are surrounded by dozens of guitars, but we aren't learning anything about them. Not yet. Not until we know our tools and they know us. In a few weeks though, we will be steeping in a gluttonously concentrated tincture of Guitar.

A new page entitled A Fine New Place is up! This page shares my experience of relocating to a town of 16,493, give or take a few, after living for years in the center of a city several hundred thousand strong. Won't be much guitar talk going on here, no sir.

Here's to a sweet and giving Indian summer, and to making your connection.

2 comments:

  1. I'm having a Pavlovian moment just thinking about that delectable aroma. Lucky!

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