East Meet Mid-West

Across the courtyard from my brand new office highrise, there is a little art gallery. On my first day, I walked past and pointed out one of the photos in the front window to a new co-worker:


"Hey!" I said, "That's where I'm from!"

Today I wandered into the gallery on my lunchbreak and discovered that the artist, Maxwell MacKenzie was born in Otter Tail County, MN, incidentally the same county that my own mother was born and raised in. Now living on the East coast, he periodically visits MN, ND and Montana in the summer to take photographs of "desolate landscapes."

The nostalgia of these photos for me was overwhelming. A squat line of Sioux grain bins, sentinels across a blank prairie; huge skylines highlighted by one lonely silo; long forgotten farmhouses slowly being reclaimed by the earth, tiled at precarious angles and poised to collapse (I remember crawling through how many of those as a kid?!? Mom, why didn't you stop us?).

And then, when I noticed the $1500 price tags, I started to laugh.

I've been sitting on a gold mine all these years and didn't even know it!

M is for MN,
M.