[St. Paul, Minnesota] Like Frank Sinatra once sang in one of his songs: it's nice to travel, but it is also nice to come back home, and I felt that way when I got off the plane at the international airport in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and went home to my apartment, where my mother and I lived together. Between her living with me, and I with her, we had accumulated a few decades living together. She would die in 2003, living in one of my houses; I would acquire several rental properties before she would pass on. She was one of two, only two people in the world I could travel with: so I'd soon finalize in time to come, without getting frustrated that is. And so I came back to my one little room in our apartment, and she was happy to see me, and I was then in the process of buying a three-plex, apartment house, about a mile away, down Rice Street in St. Paul, where we'd live, and she'd live the last six and half years of her life, in the lower apartment, and I in the upper (1094 Albemarle). In the mean time, Christmas was around the corner, and 1997, was also, it would be a most prosperous year for me.

A qualitative change had already set in that was not all apparent to me. Sandy and I talked on the phone a lot, sent postcards back and forth and then I got a big box with a horde of small gifts in it from her. The Summer Palace, in Beijing, where wee had stuck in our minds, we'd see each other again, seemed to be real to me now, with all these gifts, and love talk over the phone. I never told her directly I loved her, but I felt it at times I did, and perchance she picked up on it, that I did, but did I? (It really was still a rundown question in my mind; one I didn't care to pull up.) I was making plans in my mind thought, to go to Stockbridge in February of next year, why not, I could head right on down to Nantucket from there and why not have some company. Perhaps those days in China were packed with exotic desperation for us both, bizarre behavior I was showing for sure (as was she I hope), but it felt good. I even wrote a song for her, "As Love Goes by, ? and perhaps that was my way of saying I loved you to her, but I knew better.

I had asked her to send me some pictures of her in sexy gowns, and she did, it didn't surprise me, they were briskly fashionable, cheerful to the male eyes, nothing completely bad, or complete nudity, but they inaccurately keep me thinking we had something going. She was smiling in her pictures, that also was a note of sobriety for me. I doubt she really know what she was doing at times, just grabbing whatever was saturating her soul, and not weighting its c consequences, for her or anybody. Something someone would do to avoid living the present perhaps, I call it in counseling, disassociation; you are present, but not mentally.

The winter was cold in Minnesota, and the sun was far from the horizon, only giving a slanting light, the effects of the cold frost beautiful as it was, and could be, it was also maddening at times, because it appeared so far and in-between ?the gaps were too big. Winters in Minnesota can get folks to thinking, to move, but the beauty of Minnesota seems to bring them back if they do, unless they do not, find a more beautiful place, and warm place at that.