Style Scout: Great Big Home

Why where we live is broader than where we hang our hat.

Getting to Lake Pepin is all about the wonderful drive down the Wisconsin side on Highway 35.

Image credit: Photo by savagecats via Creative Commons

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By: Cy Winship |   July 2011   |  From the print edition

Home: The idea shifts with the seasons. All winter it’s about warmth and firelight, hiding from the cold and the dark in our caves.

When summer finally comes, home becomes so much more, so much bigger. It’s not just about houses, gardens and cities. It opens up to include lakes and rivers, fields and valleys. My own sense of home gets widened by exploring the Minnesota countryside.

One sparkling Saturday morning, we load up the car and go pick up our friends, Duane and Allen, to explore yet again a favorite landscape: Lake Pepin. It’s all about the wonderful drive down the Wisconsin side on Highway 35. If you’ve done it, you know the beautiful river bluffs and sweeping arcs of lake. Like us, you’ve stopped at the historical marker telling about the Indian maiden who threw herself to her death rather than marry a man she didn’t love. And you’ve ended up in Stockholm or Nelson, had some ice cream, and then driven back home.

But, for us, there’s always something new, wonderful and odd to discover. Being a design addict, I can’t help but look for treasures to bring home; weird and wonderful artifacts from county fairs and farm sales have graced the walls and shelves of our home for years. I live for our yearly visit to Ellsworth’s Cheese Curd Days (the pint-sized beauty/dairy/pepper/cheese queens waving madly from floats in the parade are wonderful). We also got our favorite kitchen tchotchke there: a metal napkin/salt-and-pepper holder cut to look like (OK, vaguely resemble) a crowing rooster.

And here’s the thing: Silly as it sounds, all winter that rooster makes me see sunlight, green grass, cows, cheese curds—even the fainting goats we petted and watched collapse (because loud noises make them freeze and fall over) when their owner clapped her hands—every time I grab a napkin. In one silly little thing, an entire world.

You might think: “Oh, lovely. Some sneering city creeps making fun of country bumpkins and their quaint little towns.” That is so not true. I love these people and towns and fields and lakes, and the skies dotted with perfect clouds. I love having wonderful, unaffected things in my home that remind me to be honest and true. If you leave your attitude behind and open your heart, then sweet, corny, lovely adventures await.

We always stop in Maiden Rock. There wasn’t much there until the inimitable Cynde Randall opened Swan Song gallery—she’s gathered great area artists, herself among them. And just across the street is not only the Smiling Pelican Bakery but, most of the summer, a stand with the best and most varied pickles and jams anywhere courtesy of Virgal Tiffany, who mans (actually, womans) the post.

While we’ve crisscrossed the countryside from Elmwood (its UFO festival is on our calendar this summer) to Stockholm to Fountain City (the best embroidered kitty cat—yes, you heard me—dish towels anywhere are found at the Cat Tail on Main Street), somehow we kept missing Alma. Oh, I’d been up to Buena Vista (pronounced Byoona Vista, we were corrected) but serendipity finally led us last summer to a tiny place called simply the Weaving Studio on Alma’s Main Street.

It wasn’t at all what we expected. It’s run by Marcia Kjos, and her work is so edgy and cool, you’d think you were in some gallery in Brooklyn. Strange, bulbous knit tubes hang like tentacles from the ceiling, above wonderful paintings that evoke Russian iconography with an unsettling twist. I couldn’t get enough. Then the grandmotherly Marcia insisted we trek to the other end of Main Street to see her daughter’s shop, The Commercial.

At once, it all made sense. Simply one of the coolest people anywhere, Kristine Kjos brings in terrific artists. Her husband Tim Erickson’s paintings are thrilling, and I couldn’t resist bizarrely beautiful rough clay bowls by local Kelly Jean Ohl that seem to have been stamped with lace and burned. Gorgeous ceramic bas-relief panels by Tina Schowalter and tiny paintings by Brooklynite Carri Skoczek are some of the coolest pieces there. Kristine told me that the Alma General Store will open this summer as well—part farmers’ market, part hardware store and part art gallery (why not?), it has the town abuzz.

It’s hard to believe right now that winter can return, but it will. When it does, by touching these odd treasures, I will see and feel sunlight, and smell the grass while that blinding winter hell rages outside.