Friday's full moon will be the biggest one of the year, with Mars hovering nearby -- and the local forecast calls for clear skies, which might even make it worth braving the sub-zero temperatures to step outside after dark to see.

According to Spaceweather.com, the moon at perigee (the closest point in its elliptical orbit around the earth), as it is now , will appear "as much as 14 percent wider and 30 percent brighter than other full Moons you'll see later in 2010."

A century’s worth of tree planting and conservation transformed our prairie landscape into one of the country’s great urban forests. This is the story of the people who have kept it alive.

When the city of Minneapolis was rising out of the prairie, it really was a prairie around here, not the forest of nearly a million trees that envelops us today. Charles Loring, first president of the Park Board and generally credited with being the first to plant trees in the city, described our terrain in the board’s 1885 annual report as “undulating prairie for the most part bare of trees. The only natural trees were clumps of black oak and scattered burr oak. These in the progress of improvement have largely disappeared.” As David C. Smith notes in his 2008 book, City of Parks, Loring expressed his hope for “the stimulus of a wider tree culture.”

Fairy tales and cultural fables tend to share universal themes, yet each culture has its own unique way of expressing them. Tales from a Finnish Tupa offers the Lappland perspective on many familiar stories, and also relates some tales that are likely new to most of us. First published in 1936 and delightfully illustrated by Laura Bannon, this collection of Finnish folktales was recently republished by the University of Minnesota Press.

By Jack Armstrong
Last winter, contrary to my generally prudent nature, I had sort of resolved to unpack my old hockey skates, still in their box from our move a couple of years earlier, and get out on the ice.

This created some anxiety for a number of reasons, the most salient being the fact that I didn’t really know whether I could remain vertical on those thin blades after so many years of successfully ignoring their allure. This was not always the case. For a brief period of time in the late ’60s, I was a genuine puckhead.

The cover of the new issue of MOQ features a wintry leafless tree in icy blue surroundings, painted by Minneapolis artist Kat Corrigan. Kat has a whole series of tree paintings, as well many lively and charming paintings of dogs, cats, and even power poles, which you can see on her Web site. She also makes colorful and inventive one-of-a-kind sweaters that are combinations of two or more repurposed sweaters, which she calls Frankensweaters and sells through her Etsy shop. We asked Kat to tell us more about herself, including how she came to do a set of paintings based on a flying lesson, the dogs she has known, and the Art Shanty Projects.

The ubiquitous gray squirrels that populate our backyards, raid our bird feeders and confound our pets are such common urban denizens that it’s easy to overlook their brainy resourcefulness. In the weeks preceding the first snowfall, these busy rodents harvest and bury thousands of acorns and other nuts, build a shelter that protects them from the most inclement weather, and still find the time -- and surplus food -- to fatten themselves up for the long winter. Indeed, recent studies suggest that these guys may have a lot more on the ball than we think.

Even as the Walker Art Center opens a new exhibiton, Benches and Binoculars, that may, in displaying art salon-style, echo the way in which the museum's founder showed his impressive art collection in his home, we can be reasonably certain that the art itself probably does not reflect T. B. Walker’s aesthetic preferences.

AMONG Minnesota's many “monuments” to Thomas Barlow Walker are an art museum and library in Minneapolis, a town in northern Minnesota, and a grandiose structure sporting Corinthian capitals and neoclassical female figures near the main entrance of Lakewood Cemetery, where he was buried in 1928.

Fall is a great time to begin the permaculture practice of hugelkultur, which reminds us that, with gardening anyway, everything worth doing has been done before, even if it’s new to us.

By Sharon Parker
When we moved into a modest bungalow on Fifth Avenue some 20 years ago, we picked what appeared to be the best location for a garden, and were pleased to discover that the spot boasted a rich humus that nurtured a vigorous crop of vegetables, even before we turned our first batch of compost and added it to the beds. Occasionally, to our amusement, we would push a shovel into the ground and turn up a steak bone or other such remnant of somebody’s dinner.

At first glance, Labiner’s lesson-oriented novel may seem like a quirky way to structure a story, but once we were able to absorb the first dozen or so teachings it becomes clear that there’s a lot to learn before we can fully grasp -- or embrace -- this tale. Eventually, everything comes into focus as two cousins -- one a carefree Hollywood celebrity, the other a neurotic romance writer -- meet in Berlin and gradually unravel a tragic family mystery.