Last weekend, my husband and I took a quick trip to Minneapolis to visit our friend Sonya, who moved to the city from Canada two years ago. We had our youngest, 4-year-old Edith, in tow.
When we arrived at Sonya’s apartment, a sunlit walk-up in the city’s historic Powderhorn neighborhood, Edith fell immediately in love with Sonya’s honey-colored cat, Harvey. Harvey is an indoor-outdoor cat who roams the neighborhood, but he returns throughout the day to Sonya’s large front stoop, where he waits patiently to be let in.
Harvey’s prowling territory is one of the city’s most eclectic neighborhoods, and one of its most community-minded. Powderhorn has a lovely and deliberate wildness about it — there are lawns filled with native grasses and wildflowers, abandoned tricycles, brightly colored murals and painted fences. Some yards have touches of humor — abundant garden gnomes, a giant dinosaur…