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It's our forty-ninth wedding anniversary this week. 

She's a patient woman. 

I just wanted to acknowledge that, get it out there, before the rest of you said it. 

We started the week with a road trip. A family member is having some health challenges severe enough to send her to the Mayo Clinic and we wanted to drop in to say hello. 

It's one side of the state to the other, 503 miles as a round trip. At this point in my life, that's a long way to drive in one day. On the other hand, I was a farmer for thirty years, spending ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day driving up and down a field at 3.5 mph. I've had some training. 

We like road trips. Granted, transiting southern Minnesota isn’t quite the same as white knuckling through Norwegian fjord country or driving Highway 1 from Monterrey to Big Sur, but it's still interesting. 

I can imagine some of you are thinking, “But there's nothing to see!” 

That's because you're not looking, buddy. 

From an assortment of suicidal pheasants lurking on the shoulder of the road waiting for an opportunity to hurl themselves at my bumper, to a bald eagle glaring at us from the ditch with talons firmly fastened in a dead deer, there was always something that caught our eye. 

It's a road I've driven fairly often. Near New Ulm, back in the 70s, someone built themselves a geodesic dome house. For half a century I've been fighting the urge to stop in and ask, “So, how's this working out for you?” I never have and probably never will, but I'm still curious. A few miles further is a driveway marked by two stone lions and a wrought iron gate that's always closed. It seems a little pretentious for our part of the world, but what do I know?  Maybe the communists didn't kill Czar Nicholas' family and that's where Anastatia ended up. 

I created a new playlist on my phone. It's enough music for about five hours of travel, and every song is one I'd like to hear again. There are also podcasts and occasionally an actual radio station. 

We have a routine to our travel. My wife works on her iPad, we chat about politics, grandchildren, and what color we're going to paint the house. If my eyes start to droop, she drives while I take a fifteen-minute power nap, which, oddly enough, is plenty to keep me alert for hours and hours. 

She's often looking down, while I enjoy watching the countryside. When I was young, most farms looked pretty much the same – white house, red barns, a smattering of livestock and maybe a swing set. Now it's all changed. A $500,000.00 house surrounded by millions of dollars of equipment will show up on the right, and half a mile further on the left is a rundown trailer house with four rusting cars on what is supposed to be a lawn. In the small county where I live, twenty percent of the people get their health care through public assistance AND there are 156 farmers who each own more than two million dollars' worth of farmland. What I always find amusing is that if you put the two groups side by side, they'd look pretty much the same. If he sat by the side of the road with a tin can at his feet, the wealthiest farmer I know would rack up the change, plus some folding money, from anyone who didn't know him. 

We reached our destination about noon, navigated the maze that is the Mayo Clinic Campus, visited for a couple of hours and then headed for home. Our visit didn't serve any real purpose, except that sometimes the only way to show someone how deeply you care is to show them. 

There was a winter storm forecast ratcheting up and we took back the keys to the ranch from a granddaughter and were tucked in safe and sound at home just as the snowflakes started to fall. 

My guess is some people reading this are thinking, “What a dumb way to celebrate an anniversary.” 

You're wrong. 

Copyright 2024 Brent Olson