This is the first year I have ever seen lotus flowers bloom across half the Mississippi River (in early July near Stoddard Wisconsin) and this past weekend I saw hundreds of American white pelicans brood in a protected area of the Mississippi near the Savanna, Illinois/Sabula, Iowa bridge. Amazing.

I have lived within a hundred miles of the Mississippi River most of my life. I have traveled the river roads from Dubuque, Iowa to St. Louis. Missouri hundreds of times. I’ve walked along the banks in dozens of Mississippi River towns, some only a few blocks in width, wedged on the available land between the river’s edge and the vertical bluffs. A  few of the larger cities crept up those limestone bluffs and then sprawled along the prairie lands – Dubuque, Minneapolis, Keokuk, Quincy, St. Louis are just a few I know well, the ones I have visited since childhood.

I’ve explored the Mississippi at its start in Minnesota, the beginnings of the river only a few steps wide. I’ve explored the Mississippi in Louisiana, boating through the bayous, walking along the Gulf Coast. My family and I took a cruise that left from New Orleans, heading to the Caribbean, and we rocked and rolled through the Mississippi Delta in the dark. Occasionally we’d see lighted platforms from the oil rigs, truly out in the middle of nowhere. Sitting at our dinner table on the cruise, we were mesmerized by the controlled sloshing of our drinks in the clear crystal glasses. The ship would tip towards the starboard, then tip towards the port, like a baby’s cradle, as it followed the channel. A bit disconcerting on our first evening on board. Our waiter told us they were trained to fill the glasses to different levels, dependent on how rough the river was running.

The Mississippi River is the longest river that begins and ends in the United States, if you consider the outpouring of her waters into the Mississippi Delta as part of the country. I never quite realized how attached I was to this river until I began exploring more of the river and the roads and towns that are near her shores.

Love this river in her many forms!