I slipped into my neon yellow and white Columbia double-layered jacket, stretched see-through-thin black gloves over my pink-laquered fingernails, and tucked my chemically curly hair under a black fleece hat – knowing the latter would be on just long enough to get out of sight of my mother – and opened the door to meet the cold December day.

I inhaled and felt the northern Minnesota air frost my lungs.

Brrrrrrr.

It was 1988, and I was heading to meet my best friend and neighbor, Jen, for our daily quarter-mile walk up gravelly (and often ice-glazed) Clay Street to catch the bus.

I scampered up our Everest-steep-and-equally-icy driveaway and turned left onto West Skyline Parkway. There were only a handful of houses along this stretch, and most of them, like Jen’s, were tucked up or down short gravel dead-ends. Our neighborhood was heavily wooded, quiet, and almost felt rural, though we were mere minutes from either the city of Duluth proper, slightly north, or the population-3,000 railroad town of Proctor to the south. And though we were closer, as the seagulls fly, to Duluth’s schools, we attended middle school in Proctor, at the well-worn Jedlicka Junior High.

Despite the wind, I pulled off the hat as soon as I was out of eyeline of my house. In sixth grade, it was, of course, cool to be cold.

I trudged along Skyline, my feet crunching the brown-and-white rocks of snow and road salt.

Skyline was aptly named; we were perched atop Duluth’s rugged ridgeline, peering down over the most storied of Great Lakes, Lake Superior. It was a million-dollar view, but to us, it had become like wallpaper, and we took it for granted. While it had been a frigid winter so far, the lake itself remained open, with only a thinly weighted border of ice tracing the shoreline. Today, the water was gray, dotted with menacing whitecaps.

I passed our next door neighbor’s house as I always did – vigilantly. Their black lab, Bucky, had tried to take a chunk out of my right calf last summer, latching on with massive carnivorous teeth as I biked innocently past.

He was chained up. Whew.

We were sporty, outdoorsy middle school girls, though I had a girly side, occasionally wearing (too much) blue mascara, shiny heeled shoes, and the occasional dress. Our neighborhood – and Skyline – provided us many opportunities to recreate. We biked up the long, steep hill into Proctor proper to buy boxes of Swiss Cake Rolls ($.99) and Oatmeal Creme Pies ($1.09) at the red-and-white canopied Milk House. We “Rollerbladed”( inline skating was referred to exclusively by the product brand name then) back and forth between the intersections: Highland and Vinland to the northeast; busy Highway 2 to the southwest. We walked Bruiser, Jen’s lab mix, and Lucy, my beagle, both along the road and in the woods.

Ahh, the woods. The glorious woods!

As mentioned, there weren’t many neighbors along this stretch; instead of houses, there was a thick canopy of oaks, maples, and numerous representatives of the evergreen variety. In the summer, we’d zig zag through the trees, the goldenrod, and the prickly buckthorn toward ‘da crick,’ more formerly known as Keene’s Creek. The Creek flowed out of the St. Louis River, a thick, mucky tributary of Lake Superior, ribboned a loop through west-central Duluth, and eventually wound its way back to the St. Looie.

At that time, the late-80s to early-90s, the St. Looie was popular for fishing, but it was so polluted with ore tailings from up north on da Range that signs were plunked everywhere imploring one “Do NOT eat the fish!”

Despite the warnings, da crick was one of our favorite places to frolic. In the summer, we’d sit inside any of the dozens of two-and-three-foot waterfalls, smiling through the translucent spray, and enjoying the whirlpool-like suds and spins the falls’ splashes created in the pools below. In the winter, we’d high-step through the snow in our tall moon boots, hopping over rocks and admiring the frozen falls’ silent stillness.