Monthly Archives: December 2007

Winter is all of two days old here in the Twin Cities and we’ve already been subjected to a healthy dose of what the weather people refer to as ‘blowing and drifting snow’. It arrived early this morning, much to the chagrin of those of us who planned to finish our holiday gift buying and dinner preparations on what is arguably the last honest shopping day of the season. But we went out. In our jeeps. And we crawled around the city and went into shops and markets and did what we do every other day – we talked about the weather. And when the man at the BBQ counter finished chopping the crispy duck we stopped to pick up for lunch, he turned around to hand it to us and noticed that we’re grinning maybe a bit more than we usually do when we pick up a crispy duck and he cocks his head to the side and says “you honestly like this weather, don’t you?”. And he’s right. Because even though we don’t necessarily enjoy jumping out of our cars to flick icy wiper blades before the light turns green, it certainly seems more real than Christmas shopping in Phoenix must be.
So we go home and make our giant bowl of udon and duck soup and then wrap our gifts and take inventory to make sure that we’ve bought enough of those little tiny loaves of rye bread that you only buy once a year because everyone knows that herring tastes just fine on a Triscuit. But sometimes you wanna dress it up a bit, and Bittman says to try it on rye with a slice of apple and he’s normally good at this stuff so we buy the tiny loaf and the apples and figure we’ll plate them up an hour or two before dinner. And if it doesn’t work out, we’ve got plenty of Triscuits in the pantry.
Then we clean and scrub and do some work in the kitchen and play with the kids and suddenly it’s dark, like it seemingly has been for weeks, though we heard at the solstice party we went to last night that the days are getting longer now. So dinner and baths and pj’s and stories and then we head back outside to shovel the sidewalk because Grandma and Grandpa will be here early and we want to get a start on it.
And it’s so quiet out. Even with our headphones on we can tell. A truck with a blade on it is plowing out the old lady’s driveway a couple doors down the street and it sounds like it’s miles away. We throw the snow into the wind and it blows back in our face but we keep doing it because we’re trying to throw it where we planted our tulips and they’ll be thirsty come spring. And we’re done too soon, so we mill around, shoveling a path to the woodpile, neatening up the walk, and the boy on our headphones sings about Barcelona, and it sounds nice, but rather than packing our bags we decide to go back inside, where it smells like fireplaces and homemade fudge, and have a beer and watch the game and blog like Garrison Keillor.