Goodbye, Minnesota

If you’ve been following my blog (or know me in real life), you’ll know that I’ve been living in Minnesota for the last three years while getting my MFA in Creative Writing from Minnesota State University, Mankato. Well, last Saturday, I officially graduated! I’m a master of fine arts, people!

I didn’t get to have a graduation—but I did get to do a virtual thesis reading/defense with my friend Liz!

Don’t worry, I’m not done with school yet. I’m returning to my hometown of Lexington to get my PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Kentucky this fall. (I just really like reading and writing essays, okay.)

But before I move on to the next five years of my life, I feel that I need to reflect back, at least a little, on the last three years.

I moved to Minnesota the summer after graduating from undergrad and getting engaged, and I never anticipated how beautiful and difficult it would be. I was 21, and the longest I’d spent away from Kentucky was four months while I studied abroad. But here I was, leaving all my friends and family behind to move twelve hours away to some northern state with which my only familiarity came from Marshall Eriksen in How I Met Your Mother.

Three years later, I’m thankful for how much I learned from my time in Minnesota—how much I grew in confidence with who I am as a person, the fact that I can drive on ice and snow without having a panic attack, that I can now teach in front of 25 students or read my work aloud to a room full of people without blushing so badly that it looks like I have a sunburn.

Unfortunately, I did not get to say goodbye to Minnesota. In March, I left for spring break, expecting to have my lasts with all the people and places I’d grown to love (or hate) on my own terms before May. Instead, I returned to mandatory quarantine after having interacted with a COVID-19 positive friend, and I didn’t leave my apartment (except to go hiking and get groceries) for the next month. When the U-Haul truck was packed up, the best I could do was drive through the city and point out places, recount a few memories, to my brother and Ryan.

So here are all my goodbyes that I didn’t get to say, to the good and bad:

Goodbye to the twelve-hour drive, which I made at least 20 times (though I could have missed a couple). To hitting unexpected snow and detours onto rural, unplowed roads. To the toll bridge in Louisville they decided to install after I moved. To the exit with the Kum n’ Go, which is the worst name for a real business that I’ve ever heard. To the stretch of highway in the desolate cornfields of Iowa where that deer totaled my car on my birthday. You suck. I will not miss you.

Goodbye to my apartment. To the motorcycles and trucks that careened down Madison Avenue, so loud it shook my room. To the creepy locked door in my closet. To the unbelievably tiny bathroom with the door that didn’t lock. To the floors, which I didn’t know were slanted until the day I moved in, sat down in a desk chair, and rolled across the empty living room. To the weird nook in the wall and the thermostat that read 90 degrees that first summer, 55 degrees in the winter. To the kitchen, the gas stove and oven, the double-sink with a window above it that fogged whenever we cooked in the wintertime. To Kayla, who made my last two years immeasurably better by being my roommate. To all the living room yoga, millionaire’s shortbread, post-workshop talks that went way past our bedtimes, songs sung while cooking, movies watched, and especially to Mr. Right. To the landlord’s now-wife, whose door I knocked on with shampoo in my hair, asking if she knew why my smoke detector was going off at full volume like there was a fire, and she had to explain that the batteries were just dead. To my first Minnesota friend and across the hall neighbor, Liz.

Goodbye to the Cities. To the MSP airport, where I’ve only not been yelled at one time about trying to pick someone up from arrivals. To the Mall of America, which I went to four times in my first six months of living in Minnesota and then never went to again. To the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the room that simulates a day in a 17th-century French estate. To the Minnesota Zoo, empty in the wintertime, my and Ryan’s favorite kind of zoo, and its two different species of otter. To the Como Zoo and Conservatory, which is free, my and Ryan’s second favorite kind of zoo. To the crêpes Kayla and I got before my first time going wedding dress shopping. To eating Juicy Lucys at the places with competing claims to have invented them. To Spoonbridge and Minnehaha Falls and going to my first club and my first barcade. To eating fried donuts with mac n’ cheese inside and trying a vegan restaurant for the first time. To Minnesota’s Largest Candy Store, where we stopped almost every time went to the Cities, and their Kinder Buenos and apple fritters.

Goodbye to the places I went to find nature. To Minneopa Falls, frozen in the winter and powerful in the spring. To the bison. To Rasmussen and the floating bridges that bounced on top of the water when you jumped. To Bray Park and the paddle-boats Kayla and I rented. To the Kasota Prairie, where Kayla stepped on a snake. To Seven-Mile Creek and getting to put my feet in the water for the first time in too long. To Sibley Park and its farm animals and the Christmas lights show. To Linnaeus Arboretum and the roses and the vegetable garden behind the historic cabin from which I stole some cherry tomatoes.

Goodbye to MSU’s campus. To the twenty-minute walk from my car to my classroom. To the Insomnia Cookies where I ran into one of my past students and ended up talking for way too long, the double-chocolate-chip in my hand going cold. To the shared TA office where one of my students liked to sit and talk for hours about mushrooms and weird historical facts and art. To the TA who slurped all of his food and talked on the phone while cough other people were working. To the classrooms where I learned to give lectures and write on a whiteboard while talking and casually sit on the table up front instead of standing behind the podium. To the CSU, where I could get Chick-fil-A and undoubtedly see any student who claimed to be sick and missed my class earlier that day. To the Good Thunder reading room, where Hisham Matar was way too gracious about my writing. To the classrooms in the basement of the Performing Arts building, where band practice interrupted literary discussions and students holding instruments would always be lined up in the hallways. To the bathroom outside the Ceramics studio, which was, no contest, the best on campus.

Goodbye to my students. To the one I didn’t recognize in Aldi, who had to repeat his name as he checked me out. To the one who waved to me every time he saw me for the next two years. To the ones who came to my office hours, who emailed me for help, who asked for advice about life, who just needed someone to listen. To the ones who just took my class because it was an easy A. To the ones who came back to visit six months or a year later. To the ones who taught me what lo-fi hip hop was and that just because people like that food, doesn’t mean it should be a chip flavor (looking at you, pickle chips). To the ones who frustrated me so much I wanted to shake them by the shoulders and the overachievers who did all the extra credit even though it wasn’t designed for people with a 99 in the class. To the student who refused to answer my questions of the day. To the student who forged two doctor’s notes, not bothering to check that she had signed them with the name of the chief of the entire hospital. To the student who said his family made barely alcoholic beer by melting burned bread and the one who wrote beautiful poems but her family wanted her to be a nurse and the one studying marketing who dreamed of writing a Hollywood script.

Goodbye to Ceramics. To the hardest class I’ve ever taken. To taking an undergrad class as a grad student. To the studio where I nearly cried after failing at making a cylinder for weeks on end, where the professor told me countless times that all my clay was at the bottom, where he once destroyed my in-progress cylinder to demonstrate something to another student. To my fellow classmate who would come into the studio even though he was already done with the project, then take all of his finished pieces and display them on his wheel, waiting for praise and answering questions. To all the pieces sitting on my shelf that I may never see again. To all the honeypots I made because I couldn’t stop leaving clay at the bottom of my cylinders. To the cat pitcher I designed with a tiny mouth opening for the water to run out over its tongue that was so stupid, it made me cry from laughing so hard. To the chameleon I sculpted and perched atop a cup and the tree frog I stuck to side of one. To the rose-vine pitcher that earned me my first compliment. To the dreams I had of wheel throwing because I couldn’t stop thinking about it, even when I was asleep, the callouses on my hands and fingers, the rush of satisfaction when I threw cups with paper-thin walls.

Goodbye to my professors. To Geoff, whose guidance helped me survive taking Novel Workshop as a first year and complete a second novel the next year. To Chris, who taught me that I was capable of writing a short story and whose comments helped me conceptualize my thesis novel on a thematic level. To Rick, who is generous with his time and advice and without whom I couldn’t have been the co-managing editor of Blue Earth Review. And to Robin, who made me a more confident teacher, whose discussions as my thesis advisor were the only thing stopping me from burning out on my novel, and whose positive energy made me a better person in general.

Goodbye to my friends. To the people I didn’t get to see much before I left because I was hoping to spend time with them after theses were turned in. To the only people who have ever been able to coax me to dance, slightly willingly. To the people I got to see Portland, San Antonio, California, and the Cities with, who went hiking and to bookstores and stood in line for Voodoo Donuts with me. To the people I trusted with my work. To the friend who made me late to class for the first time in my academic career because the restaurant took so long to bring her food out. To the people I watched Endgame with. To the people I will think of when I remember my time in Minnesota.

Goodbye to Minnesota. To the -50 degree windchill that froze my snot inside my nose and the tears on my cheeks. To the April blizzards. To the mosquitoes so populous it was like a horror movie hiking near a creek in the summer. To the people who said, You betcha, unironically. To the worst drivers I’ve ever seen. To tales of using a snowmobile like a jet-ski and driving across frozen lakes as shortcuts on pizza delivery routes. To the way the thick layers of snow iced trees and houses during the winter, making everything look like a cartoon Christmas movie. To the sun dogs, fractals lighting up the sky. To the kindness of strangers pushing your car out of a snowdrift. To saying, next winter won’t be as bad as this one.

It’s been real.