I just returned from Duluth, Minnesota, the city where I was born—and a city I still love, with its steep rock ledges spilling into the waters of Lake Superior. Duluth is a place of wild, harsh beauty, an ancient lava spill of a town built from iron ore and timber, railroads and steel, a town of mansions and what my mom always called “tarpaper shacks,” hiking trails and corner bars. A town of equal parts natural majesty and ring-around-the-collar. When I first met my husband Jon—this was twenty-two years ago—Duluth was one of the first places I brought him. It was almost as if I felt he had to see Duluth (which he never had!) if he wanted to see the whole of me, the essence of who I was and am. And I describe that November visit to Duluth in The Part That Burns, in the chapter called “Wingless Bodies,” which you can also read and even listen to here, on Up the Staircase Quarterly.
But I also wrote something less polished and more personal about that trip to Duluth, something only for myself and for Jon, called “Searching for Agates.” It’s a poemish thing, written in the moment, about the decision I was trying to make back then, during that overcast day on Lake Superior looking into the distance standing next to a man with whom I was falling deeply and precariously into love. The decision before me was whether to leave my lonely marriage to my children’s father in order to try to make a life with Jon, or try to stay in that lonely marriage, which obviously seemed the safer choice. I called this simple thing I wrote “Searching for Agates,” because that is what Jon and I did during that long-ago visit to Duluth, and it’s also something I did as a child on the shores of Lake Superior, and something I taught my own children to do, as well. I have always found it a magical and healing thing, searching for agates. Searching for agates requires careful observation, a meditative mind, and much patience. So, it’s a lot like writing. And living. I have never revised this thing, so I don’t call it a poem. Instead, I’ve left it organic and a little askew, just the way it fell out of me, because that’s how my love affair and eventual marriage to Jon really felt: organic and a little askew and very, very brave. I chose the possibility of a love deeper than I thought I deserved, even though I knew it would hurt to leave the marriage I grew up within and where I first found any kind of safety. Some decisions hurt a lot even when they’re full of light.