Roam: Minneapolis and Mankato, Minnesota

As many of you may be aware, I'm spending the summer teaching in Denver for the Institute of Reading Development, the same program I worked for two years ago in Seattle. I love this job because though I'm certainly not called to be a teacher, the program spouts all the same ideals about the formative power of the written word that I've been spouting for years. In other words, it's my corporate kindred spirit.

The other reason I love this job is my other passion: travel. The program takes place in cities all across the nation, and I can choose a new city I've never lived in (hence my current placement in Denver) to work. They also have a habit of calling their teachers up and asking them to fly across the nation to teach extra classes. My summer in Seattle, they sent me to North Carolina for four weeks: perhaps one of the best months of my life. I met the wonderful Williams family on one of my flights, and before I knew it, I was staying at their beach house on the NC coast, eating hush puppies and teasing Blackbeard's ghost...

This summer I accepted their offer to be a Substitute Teacher in Denver, and soon enough, last week I was off to Minneapolis, MN with just a few days notice. I couldn't be more excited, for one particular reason:

Betsy. 

It's no secret that I love to read. It's no secret that reading was practically my whole life as a child. And it's also no secret that there are some characters in some books that become such a part of yourself you can't even remember where you leave off and your favorite character begins...

In the tradition of Louisa May Alcott (Little Women) and L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables), Maud Hart Lovelace wrote 10 books chronicling her life in Mankato, Minnesota during the turn of the 20th Century in fictional style. I first read the Betsy-Tacy Books in third grade. Betsy is short, stout, brown-haired and bossy. She loves to read, wants to be a writer and loves her family more than anything. Sound familiar? Tacy Kelly is Betsy's best friend. She's red-haired, shy, beautiful and gets married first. (My sister-in-law and best friend Kelley Dawson is so the Tacy to my Betsy, trust me). The books grow as Betsy does: the first 4 are the stories of Betsy and Tacy as young girls, the next 4 are accounts of Betsy's High School years and the last 2 cover Betsy's trip around Europe and her first year of marriage. The books are beautifully written and heartbreakingly honest. I've reread these books a hundred times, learning more and more from them as I grow older and older. Betsy has never felt like a woman living a century ago to me. Betsy is everything a young girl could ask for: a companion in struggle, a role model, and wonderfully human. Whether heartbroken or having the time of her life, Betsy is undeniably real. Folks, I'm here to say, if I wasn't such a devout Catholic and didn't believe in reincarnation, I think I was Betsy in my past life.  

Upon landing in Minneapolis, I immediately took the gorgeous hour and a half drive down to Mankato to see the Betsy and Tacy houses, kept up by the Betsy-Tacy Society. The houses were closed, but I didn't care.

I had chills the entire time was I there. I'm surprised I didn't cry. I can never express how much these books mean to me, how much they meant to me as a young girl, how much they mean to me now. This heroine was a comfort, an inspiration, a role model and a friend. I intend on thanking Maud Hart Lovelace just as soon as I get to heaven.

Everything in Mankato is just how she described it: down to the layout of her neighborhood, the bench she and Tacy used to sit on, and the Big Hill behind her yellow house that they used to climb. I prowled around the houses looking in the windows, climbed the Big Hill, and snapped more pictures than I had memory space for.

The whole trip was worth it just for that. But good fortune has never come in singular moments for me. I took the beautiful drive back up to Minneapolis, and found the city had its own sights to offer. Each evening after sunset, the northern sky turned a delicate shade of sea-green. There was a crescent moon. I swear that both evenings, no matter where I went in the city, there was the smell of campfire.

Saturday I visited Minnehaha Park and saw Minnehaha Falls at sunset. Afterwards, as I drove home, right by that crescent moon, there were fireworks, just up until the moment I parked my rental car, and went into my hotel, ready to go back to Denver.