There is also an edge called the urban/wildland interface - it is that place where those species who thrive and, indeed, flourish in an environment lit by street lamps and sustained by music and culture, meet an environment brightened by northern lights and ruled by the ways of the wild.

I am a woman of that edge - the place between the northwoods that speak to my soul, and a place on Grand Avenue and Avon Street in St. Paul, where the man I love lives and where my species congregate.

I love the north. For a time I wondered if I were becoming feral. Wild places and wild things tugged at me more strongly than did domesticity. I gave myself to the pines and the coyotes long before the 'need' for material things began to fasten themselves to me. When a skein of geese penciled their return across a March sky, my heart would sing. The wind's strumming of white pine needles in an evening woodland symphony was music to my ears. The cadence of nature gave rhythm to my life.

But I have grown - indeed, become celebratory of my social being. Flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of grazing deer, it is natural. People are my kind. There is a tiny balcony overlooking Grand and Avon. In the early hours of the weekday mornings, people - business-suited and high-heeled, uniformed and studious - hover around cappuccinos in the coffee shop on the corner. I lean from my vantage point, hungering for the missives they share across their newspaper cloaked tables; pondering the secrets they exchange.

At night, the bulbed streetlamps give kinship to those in hopeful stroll, feasting on windows that display in finery the gifts and spirits of the authors and artisans of my species. Here at this edge - the recognizable skyline of this city, the art of my kind, the cuisine of my species - all ignite a fiery rhythm within me, letting me dance among the people in this place I call home.