Ship's Librarian

One of my wife's favorite movies is The Day After Tomorrow. In true Roland Emmerich form, it's a complete mess of crappy science and over-the-top CGI destruction that somehow makes a watchable film (I'm not sure how Moonfall botched this formula, though). Whenever we periodically throw the DVD in, I can never get past how the middle of the United States is essentially ignored (a common-enough trait of disaster films); I presume that Emmerich intends for us to presume that Midwesterners simply freeze to death, given that Dennis Quaid doesn't come to save them. This can probably be chalked up to the director being unfamiliar with any place that doesn't have iconic landmarks that can be blown up, which is unfortunate because I think the same film set in Minnesota would've been more entertaining and had a far more compelling cast to follow.

Even in the movie's wildly implausible scenario, I'm convinced those of us up in the north were all right. The weather forecasters prepared us for what was coming, the schools closed, and everyone rushed out ahead of the flash-freeze for bread, milk, and gas for the snow blowers. While New Yorkers were doing...whatever it was they were doing, we were sitting inside, getting up to look out the window every now and then, and inevitably comparing the current conditions to previous storms, up to and including the Halloween Blizzard of '91 (a registered trademark of the State of Minnesota). Eventually, the worst passed and we dug ourselves out and carried on. With plenty of grumbling about the cold and the snow, as is tradition.

Long, cold winters are a shared experience of all Midwesterners, but my years in Minnesota have given me an appreciation for how relative the length and the chill can be. The winters just seem to linger up here in a way I don't remember them doing when I was growing up in Illinois and Iowa. Nearly seven years in, I have come to basically write off everything between Halloween and Memorial Day.

At least until this year. We had a couple of weeks of brutal subzero temperatures and a handful of small dustings of snow, but nothing like we should have gotten. What's more, the weather's been unseasonably warm enough overall that the snow we have gotten hasn't stuck around for long, leaving the landscape brown, ugly, and dead. To top it all off, as I write this we're currently in the opening stages of what is forecast to be our most substantial storm of the season...in March, just days into what is technically spring.

So it's been a weird winter. It's not really overly relevant to anything in particular, but after finally resolving to start writing more after the new year, I've been finding it intensely difficult to follow through ever since. This isn't much, and it doesn't touch on any of the things I've thought about writing on, but it's basically my way of saying to myself (and anyone happening to be reading) that I'm still here and haven't given up yet.

Which, now that I think of it, is the message winter is sending to us right now....