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Knowing My Place <br /> <br />Aerial photograph of Little Canada in 1957 <br />We need to know where we are, so that we may dwell in our place with a full heart. <br />—Scott Russell Sanders from “Buckeye” in Writing From the Center (1995) <br />I have been put in my place. Although I have lived in my community of Little Canada, <br />Minnesota, for over twenty years, I am only now beginning to understand what it means <br />to dwell there with a full heart. Author Scott Russell Sanders writes that getting to such <br />a point requires knowing where we are. And whenever I want to know where I am, I <br />begin by getting my bearings. <br />One thing I know about where I am is that I live at forty-five degrees North Latitude, <br />which puts my town exactly halfway between the Equator and the North Pole. I also <br />know that my part of Minnesota was glaciated a number of times, and the soils and <br />terrain here now still show the influences of those glaciers and the subsequent outwash <br />of rivers and streams that formed as the ice melted.