Minnesota Prairie Roots

I SPOKE ON THE PHONE with my mom a few hours ago. As always, I ask her what’s new in Vesta, a community of some 330 in rural southwestern Minnesota.

It’s kind of an inside family joke to ask her this because she once replied to the “What’s new?” question with this answer: “Well, there’s a cardboard box blowing down the street.”

More recently, she’s told me about the corn husks blowing across the prairie from farm fields and onto her yard. Her yard has been raked twice and now it’s littered with corn debris again. She’s going to leave the mess until spring, she updated me today.

I have actually seen corn husks piled in drifts against a chain link fence right across the street from Mom’s house.

But back to that “What’s new?” question.

Today she was prepared with the most unusual of answers. “There’s a moose over by Seaforth,” she informed me. Seaforth is an even smaller town about five miles to the southeast of Vesta in Redwood County.

I was stunned. A moose?

According to information published in The Redwood Gazette, the area’s newspaper, a couple spotted and photographed the bull moose at the end of their driveway in rural Seaforth. The same moose was apparently seen several days earlier near the river by Springfield, which is even further south and east.

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources figures the moose is seeking a mate or is suffering from a parasite in the brain, either of which could have caused it to wander so far south.

In any case, southwestern Minnesota deer hunters have been warned to look before they shoot.