The end of snow

I am always struck by the stark indifference of Northern Minnesota before the snow.

The snow of course comes later and later every year.

When I was young, I remember snow drifts over my head on Thanksgiving--even Halloween!--laden clouds riding low in the sky, snagging their bottoms on the tops of white pines, listing starboard, dropping their volumes of cargo to the edges of my mind's territory at the time. Sometimes accompanied by thunder.

My sister was born at this time of year, twenty years ago during a blizzard. I was five or so, and stayed home with grandma while my parents remained socked in at the hospital, the world out of grandma's big picture window slowly filling up with ice crystals like sand in an hourglass. Windows, covered in drifts, eventually darkened, and I, too young to tell time, no longer knew day from night. Or so I remember it this way.

These days, there is no snow. It's not heat, but dryness. Clouds you can see through: empty. The fields are an almost vicious brown. A small blast of flurries will pass through to be cooked into the cracks of pavement by the sun the next day. The air is dry and bitter cold and the wind has no moisture to impede it's journey from the surface of the lake to clutch at your eyeballs.