Since I didn’t have a senior year of high school, I didn’t have to worry about the Senior Trip. My brother was still in the class, though, and my best friend was a year behind him, so I generally kept up with the happenings at Little Southern Baptist High. In the early spring, my old class voted on their senior trip plans. Faced with the possibility of going anywhere in the US they could scrape together the funds for, they chose ... Mall of America.

Needless to say, I felt this development confirmed my choice to move on down the road to early college admission. (Git along, little smartass, egghead doggie.) The class two years before us went to Colonial Williamsburg. The one-year-prior class went to the Grand Ole Opry. I wasn’t particularly impressed with either of those decisions, but at least they didn’t involve driving 750 miles on a bus in order to go shopping. For the next decade or so the occasional mention of Mall of America prompted much ranting from me, along with recitations of my old classmates' folly.

So when we moved to the Twin Cities, Mister Husband dragged me over there pronto. Not just once, but several times over that first summer. (Like all good spouses, he’s immune to my ability to bitch a blue streak.) Eventually, I stopped flailing about and started to regard it as a sort of Museum of Capitalism. When he quit smoking two years ago, walking the laps there was the only thing that settled the late-afternoon jitters, so that’s what we did every day. It was a good place for me to start walking any sort of distance again with a very slow-healing ankle injury. But generally, we visited a few times a year. Because who wants to go to a mall all the time? Particularly one clear across town by the airport? It’s not like MOA is any different than any other mall, really. It’s just way big and has an amusement park in the center.

This winter, though, we started to discuss finding some form of exercise we could both stand and a place we could both bear to do it. Walking Mall of America was about the only thing we could easily agree on, so we started going there several times each week. Once around is .57 miles, so it’s fairly easy to rack up some mileage. And it’s not difficult to not shop there, at least for us. We just walked around and around and made fun of window displays and people-watched. (Still and all, though, this makes me a mall walker. It hasn’t been something I particularly want to admit to people, but there it is.)

So it came to pass that toward the end of our 20 days on the road, I stood in the sun on a rolling hill in the lower plains. Watching the prairie grasses wave in the breeze as red-tail hawks circled overhead, I leaned toward Mister Husband and whispered, “I ... I miss Mall of America.” It surprised me. I didn’t want to replace the plains with a gigantic concrete monument to consumerism, but I did miss the mundane daily walks in that sort of a space. What an awful truth.

I enjoyed the prairie and the drive and coming back, and I haven’t really given much though to MOA since we’ve been back. But we’re headed over there tonight to walk in circles. And I’m a little more excited about that than I’d like to admit.