My heart’s in the Highlands
Bruce’s paternal side of the family hails from Luss, Scotland – and his dad was given the name Robert Burns McFarlan – after the cultural icon and poet.
“Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,
The birthplace of valour, the country of worth!
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.”
Robert Burns
My Heart’s in the Highlands, 1789
Posted: 14 July 2025
Fourth of July
“Rural filling station becomes community center and general grounds for loafing. The men in baseball suits are on a local team which will play a game nearby. The team is called the Cedargrove Team. Fourth of July, Near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “
Dorothea Lange, 1939
Posted: 4 July 2025
Weekend visit
Anne’s dad, Daniel, was born mid-March 1929 in New Prague —which per this study is considered to be the oldest Czech colony in Minnesota. The March 28th Local and Personal News section of The Wells Mirror from Faribault County reported an “R.P. Kamish motored to New Prague Saturday to visit his family. He returned Monday.” Where he motored from and returned to is uncertain—but perhaps twenty-year-older brother Robert was visiting his newly-born brother, welcoming him to the family.
Posted: 5 June 2025
A peopled garden
“To know of someone here and there
whom we accord with, who is living on
with us, even in silence, — this makes
our earthly ball a peopled garden.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795-1796.
Posted: 5 June 2025
Roots
“Nostalgia — the nostalgia for our roots — is a healthy feeling, since people with no roots are lost, and a person with no roots is sick. Roots give us strength to move forward, to bear fruit, to blossom, as the Argentine poet Francisco Luis Bernárdez said: ‘Por lo que el árbol tíene de florido / víve de lo que tíene de lo que tíene sepultado.’ All that has blossomed on the tree / lives on that which holds it underground.”
Hope : the autobiography / Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis, 2025 .
Posted: 3 June 2025
Minneapolis - 1926
Bruce’s mom, Frances, was born on February 9th,1926, in Minneapolis. Per The Minneapolis Journal’s reporting that day, suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt would speak later that week at the Unitarian church at Eighth St. and LaSalle Ave. Chapman Catt, an Iowa State University alumna, devoted her life to the expansion of women’s rights and international peace.
Posted: 17 May 2025
Candyland - Famous Since 1932
Anne’s mom, Mary Lou, was born in 1932 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, just blocks away from the then newly established Flavo Korn on Wabasha -- renamed Candyland in the late 1940’s. The shop, notably, is still in business today and its sweet scents continue to draw people in person and online. In the book Candyland in the Twin Cities (Arcadia Publishing, 2014), author Susan Barbieri shares a through-the-years account that includes famous gangsters, Depression-era, popcorn-eating moviegoers, and insight into the success of the business --providing a little flavor of old Saint Paul.
Posted: 16 May 2025