I was excited to be going home after spending four months away at college, and I was looking forward to spending the holidays with my family and friends. When my parents heard that my roommate, Sarah, was going to be spending the Holidays alone in our dorm back in Boston, they insisted that she come back to Minnesota with me. We couldn’t get Sarah a ticket for the final leg of the trip to Duluth so we landed in Minneapoli...

I was waiting outside the office of a financial aid officer at the university. If he couldn’t find me some more financial aid, I would have to drop out of school for at least a year and try to find a full time job. One semester short of graduation - just one semester short. There had to be some more aid available. I had good grades, I received several scholarships, my parents had helped, and I had borrowed as much as I da...

Everyone knows Minnesota can be really cold in the winter, but few realize how miserably hot it gets in the summer. That was the case this July with temperatures in the upper nineties and the humidity about the same. Just about 200 miles north of me is Duluth; they sometimes call it the air-conditioned city. The city in nestled at the tip of Lake Superior and almost always is twenty degrees cooler than the rest of the sta...