Duluth Digest #2.5

Today we find ourselves reprieved of the Duluth weather anomaly, or independent weather pattern; instead, we're under a flood warning stretching from our corner of Lake Superior all the way south past San Antonio to the Mexican border. My wife has relatives living in San Antonio, and it's rare that something occurring here is also occurring there. The proclivities of rain and sunshine are not the only things that I'm not used to around here; I also need an orientation to the social fabric. My wife Laura and I discussed the distinction I made in my last post about what fulfills each of us, and we came to agree that we both need the natural world AND the social construct. Living in Duluth, however, has given me some kind of detachment disorder. This may be just the absence of what I'm used to in terms of feeling connected. I've lived in larger cities until now, where I've always known how and where to facilitate whatever kind of human interaction I need. To be honest, I've never had the degree of profoundly tranquil non-human interaction that I have here, and I have definitely bonded with these physical surroundings.