Minnesota winter again

I try not to talk about the weather all the time here. I stick to when it gets interesting; giant storms, endless rains, tornadoes, thick silver coatings of ice, but, above all in my part of the world, the cold, the bitter, bitter cold. The cold is irresistible to me. 

At the bottom of my blog post will be a bunch of labels, and if you click on one you get all my blog posts that used that label. I suppose the label "weather" will bring up a fair share of posts, many of which you will want to memorize and recite at parties. Most of those will be concerned with the cold. It is as it should be. Why live in Minnesota and have no interest in the cold. This is where it happens.

What happens? 

As I write it supposedly feels like minus 25 degrees F or, get this Europeans (Hi Europeans, and really, everyone else in the world!) minus 32 degrees C. So for non Americans, it is a full seven degrees colder in Minnesota than it is for us here, which explains why Americans tend to live in Minnesota instead of other Nationalities, who mostly live in other countries. It is seven degrees warmer here for us, which makes up a bit for having to pay for health care and not getting 2 months off work every year.

But what, you wonder, is so fascinating about minus 25 degrees anyway, now working its way down to minus 30?

It turns my mundane neighborhood into a wilderness. The innocent streets are now ferocious and unbearable. Life has ground to a halt. Night has fallen. Between my house and my neighbor's house is a bit of the end of the world, desolate with the dessicated remains of grapevines and raspberry plants, stripped of even the faintest suggestion of life. Just the other side of my glass block windows, a few feet from me, it is 100 degrees colder than it is in here where I type. If I were to type these words a mere two more feet south the letters themselves would freeze in place as I wrote them. I would be unable to correct spelling or make simple edits, and you would have to put this whole blog post in a pitcher of warm water just to read it.

If it were a hundred degrees warmer outside than it is in here everybody would die! Miserable, gasping, burning death! A hundred degrees colder and mostly I just want to pop outside for a bit and feel the fierceness of the Universe. 

Ah so bitter and fresh. Beautiful, freezing Minnesota. 

We're also just loaded with maple syrup.