Last day.

Last night, as the Labor Day sun slipped away, our family hopped in the car to take a walk. 

There are many nice places to walk in the Twin Cities, but few of them are within walking distance of my house.

We decided on a local triumvirate (trium-virent? does that pun work?) of parks:  Roberts Bird Sanctuary, the Rose Garden, and the Peace Garden.  They’re all adjacent to one another, near Lake Harriet.  At the Peace Garden, we enjoyed a brand-new, still-incomplete sculpture.  It’s called "Spirit of Peace," and it commemorates the children who died as a result of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings.   But it’s the sculpture itself that I admired; it’s really a lovely idea for outdoor art.  This article from last year describes the sculpture setting.

Bronze plaques set into boulders surrounding the sculpture will show the steps involved in folding a crane. Moving from boulder to boulder, visitors to the site can fold a crane to be taken home or left at the garden.

The sculpture isn’t there yet, but the plaques and the surrounding boulders are.  There are fourteen of them, surrounding a larger one that will be the sculptures’ pedestal.  I rather liked the pedestal the way it is, without the sculpture.  It was covered with others’ paper cranes, some more avian-looking than others.

There’s a little box off to the side containing squares of paper.  Mark took two, handed me one, sat down by himself on the first boulder to see if he could fold the crane from memory.   I wandered from stone to stone following the directions.  Finally I came to the seventh or eight stone and couldn’t figure out the next step.  That stone was surrounded by partially completed, crumpled, discarded cranes, so I must have been in good company. 

The children ran around, played with their pieces of paper.   Later they almost fell in the fountain.  A nice last day of summer.