Bridge to the Past

I recently took a (really good) trip to Minneapolis, but it made me realize something about myself. This is not really about that realization, but it's tangentially related. I volunteered for Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity for a year through AmeriCorps. It started an unbelievable fifteen years ago. I had plenty of weird like normal moments in AmeriCorps. Luckily, I had a great coworker, Matt, who appreciates and can laugh at the weird things in life. We painted and performed minor repairs for low-income homeowners.

One was an older woman who told us about several strange individuals she had rent her basement to. I felt awful that she had to choose between affording her home and her personal safety. Another told us about how she had called the cops on herself before and was known to have a "black whack attack". Another, whose house we were at for a few weeks, noted how, because I was married and Matt was not, I had a license to drive in bed and he did not. There was a dog in another home who got pretty evidently aroused around me, and the owners seemed oblivious. Most days were weird, like normal. I suspect, hopefully wrongly, that for many people, if they experienced what I did, they might have negatively judged these situations. We relished them. There are so many life backgrounds, and I got to see several that were very different from my own.

I did this sketch when I had a couple hours of free time during my trip to Minneapolis. There are things in it that I would like to "fix", but I decided to just let it be the result of the time that I had on that day to draw one of the bridges between Minneapolis and St. Paul that goes over the Mississippi River, which serves as the eastern border of my home state of Iowa. A portrait of the city wouldn't feel right to me unless it were a little "off".