I want to think I never got soft. Born-and-raised Minnesotans usually feel the need to be tough, at least when it comes to the weather. For the duration of our time living in Maryland I thought I remained that way. I never wore my bulky winter coat because I didn't think it was necessary. I always made sure to acclimate my body with the onset of the colder season. But it's already apparent that I wasn't prepared to come back.
I've had it in my head for a while to continue the series comparing Minnesota and Maryland, our two homes. A while back I wrote about driving in the two states. Today the focus is on the winter weather. More and more we've been asking ourselves: 'Why do we live here?' Though the reasons we moved back have been covered and are entirely separate, it's still a question we find ourselves pondering considering the conditions this time of year.
First and most simply, it gets so much colder here. In Maryland it's extremely rare to hit single digit temperatures, much less negatives. In Minnesota those are commonplace in January and February, and isn't crazy in the adjacent months either. I'd say on average it's about 20 degrees colder here this time of year. And that probably doesn't completely take into account when temps really plunge. We've already had a handful of days when it's at least 10 below when getting up in the morning, and occasionally it stays that way all day long. Since moving I've been trying to record this by periodically taking screenshots of both the temps in our new home in Lakeville, MN and our old home in Frederick, MD. This won't be a representative sample, because I mostly remembered to do this on cold days, but it still gives us some information and hopefully drives home my point. Take a look:
Those are just the temps. It's in fact become cliche (like at this midwest jokes twitter account) but the wind is a game changer. Most of the land in Minnesota, including where we live now, is very flat and that results in a lot of wind. I'd forgotten how brutal this is. My wife and I clearly got used to, and miss, the hilly terrain in Maryland which, in addition to being beautiful, shelters the area from gusts that come unopposed across hundreds of miles. Believe it or not, this makes a difference. Here in Minnesota I wouldn't mind the cold too much, most of the time, without the frequent and piercing wind. It's howling right now, rattling our house, and I grow weary of considering its effects. Not only does it always require additional outdoor wear but it's real annoying to have to deal with stuff flying away from our front porch or the blown-over trash and recycling bins.
Then there's the snow. Snow in Maryland, and across the mid-Atlantic, is more or less an event that happens a few times a year. Beforehand there's a ton of anticipation and things often get shut down before the storm arrives, whether or not that's warranted. I heard for some time that at least Maryland, compared to Virginia, has an idea what they're doing with prepping roads and using plows. Virginia's epic failure on I-95 a few weeks ago demonstrated some truth there. In Minnesota it's been snowing like once a week. Most of the time it's not all that much, an inch or two, but it's regularly more than that. We've already had several storms of 6 inches or more. The biggest difference between Minnesota and Maryland is that all this snow accumulates through the winter. Since it never gets warm enough to melt there's typically permanent snow (and ice) cover into or even through March. If it snows enough in a winter there can also be a 'space management' problem where there's literally nowhere to put the snow alongside roads and off your driveway. It's no fun having to throw the stuff over six foot tall stacks when that happens, but luckily we've not there yet. The piles in big store parking lots can be downright impressive too. In Maryland snow begins melting immediately and anything on the ground is almost always gone within 48 hours. It's considering the snow that really makes the duration of winter depressing in Minnesota, where it'll snow into April, or later! In Maryland spring is in full force by mid-March and late snowstorms are extra unusual.
As an aside, the capacity for handling snow allows wildly different behavior when there's a winter storm. Sometimes it feels like more Minnesotans are out and about when it's snowing than when it's nice out. There's no way it's true, of course, and it's likely due to the slower conditions that makes it seems there are more people around. But the worst traffic I've been in, in Minnesota anyway, has always been the result of snow and everyone still going wherever it is they go, like work.
When it's this cold you need to run your furnace a lot, and when you do it gets painfully dry inside (and is still frighteningly cold and drafty). The conditions outside, with the cold and the wind, don't help, but the dryness inside your home over the winter months may be the worst part of all this. Having to deal with cracking, often bloody knuckles in particular gets old fast. And there's not a lot to be done about it. I feel my wife and I drink a lot of water and use heavy-duty moisturizer, to little avail. The whole-home humidifier always seems overmatched. I will say our house in Maryland also got dry, for certain, but then again the winter was much shorter and the furnace ran less, so a cessation of that pain wasn't far off.
Last of all, when you're stuck inside all day long you're bound to come down with something. This isn't in any way unique to Minnesota. But I wanted to include this because my family basically spent the month of January wrecked by sickness. I don't know how much of it came from the older son starting preschool, how much was potentially Covid (no positive tests!), or what. But I know a nasty stomach bug ran through us early in the month. Then my son got a fun ear infection/pink eye combo that probably resulted from a congestion causing cold or virus. That's my speculation because my wife has now been laid up fighting similar for the past week. Hopefully we can all get back to healthy soon.
A consistent theme is the transition back to the frozen tundra hasn't been seamless and we're not exactly enjoying it. I no longer like dealing with the cold and the snow and the dryness, and my wife does even less. Consistently the question we've asked ourselves and each other the past few months has been: 'Why do we live here?!?'
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