By Carrie Mercer
Letterboxing is a kind of outdoor treasure hunt that combines art, exploration, creative clue-writing, and orienteering skills. It began some 100 years ago when a gentleman hid his calling card on a hike in Dartmoor, England, and then wrote to his friends with cryptic clues on where to find it.

Today, participants hide a small, waterproof box containing a hand-carved rubber stamp and a small logbook, and sometimes other things like preaddressed postcards. Then they write clues, which may use landmarks, compass bearings, and other means to guide seekers, while keeping it challenging and cryptic enough to be interesting. Those clues are posted at Letterboxing North America for seekers to find and download.

A truck transporting millions of honey bees from Mississippi to North Dakota to pollinate crops was involved in an accident on I-35 in late May. The frightened and confused bees stung firefighters and others, hampering rescue efforts; and, to our mind, anyway, raised the question, why are we shipping bees across country when local native bees will pollinate our crops for free?

Herewith, another perspective on bees, both in our backyards and in agriculture, adapted from the fall 2009 issue of MOQ. —the editors

With the U.S. Postal Service sporting billion-dollar deficits, leading to a hiring freeze and officials threatening to end Saturday deliveries, among other budget-cutting moves, our local letter-carriers are carrying a little heavier burden than usual. But things could be worse. Forty years ago this spring, life at the post office was so bad that the mailmen stopped delivering the mail.

The vivid bloodroot on the cover of the new MOQ was painted by Kevan Willington, who hales from Iowa and Nebraska, earned a BFA at the Colorado Institute of Art in 1980, and now paints in his home studio in St. Paul. Willington started out as a commercial graphic artist, then started painting landscapes, and now paints intimate and increasingly fanciful images of flowers, vegetables, and birds.

If you happen to be in Roseville, at the intersection of Roselawn and Cleveland avenues, walk north along the east side of Cleveland, crossing a little cul de sac named Loren Road, and continue past the yellow fire hydrant until you come to a boulder set flush with the sloping ground. The plaque on the boulder will inform you that you are standing on the 45th parallel — the halfway point between the equator and the north pole.

A friend recently posted a cheery comment on her Facebook page, noting that she had spotted a robin in her backyard, so it must be spring, despite the abundance of snow and still mostly below freezing temperatures. Unfortunately, that old truism that robins are a sign of spring is only partly true.

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.