Hello and welcome to Don’t Remember Me Like This. Before we begin, I’d like to add a note about where and how you can enjoy this show.
Of course you can tune in wherever you listen to your favorite shows (on Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Spotify, I Heart Podcasts). But if you’re like me and like to watch movies with the subtitles on, I have full transcripts of each episode on my website, (which, obv, you’re reading right now).
Not only can you follow the transcript to each podcast (which can sometimes clarify words and phrases I just can’t pronounce) but I’ll try to add extra links and photos where I can. For this episode, I’ve added several pictures and videos of Minnesota’s most elegant season to accompany the content. In addition to several wintry landscape shots of the Twin Cities and rural Minnesota, there are pictures of kittens, a video of these two jagoffs breaking into our garage and ice lanterns. I’m glad you’re here getting the full experience of these podcasts.
And you can also find exclusive, members-only episodes like the seventh vignette from this series on my Patreon account. With your kind subscription, you get access to episodes nobody else gets to listen to as well as amazing gifts such as a signed (and therefore commercially worthless) copy of my book, Luck Favors the Prepared, custom postcards, and even custom apparel. I’ve always wanted a t-shirt that said “Don’t Remember Me Like This” on the front, without any other information. No QR code, no website.
My second best t-shirt idea is printed with the shape of the state of Texas, and underneath: “Montana.” Maybe my ideas for t-shirts aren’t the best ideas. Still, I think a Don’t Remember Me Like This t-shirt would be pretty cool. There’s a world of possibilities. So keep your eye out for drop-ship custom apparel for Don’t Remember Me Like This, coming soon (available now!).
This is a very special edition of Don’t Remember Me Like This, commemorating Minnesota’s most elegant season: winter.
I started writing these vignettes during winter break of 2022. They are bound by the common theme of winter—not just the weather, because hey, let’s talk about the weather, but the season and the unique perspectives it inspires, such as:
Making the most of Minnesota’s most elegant season
Our newest (and most mercurial) family members
And, of course, socialism
There is no winter like a Minnesota winter. So turn off that space heater before you burn down the house, mix yourself some hot coco or a hot toddy—I like my hot toddy with mixing bourbon, and equal dashes of cayenne pepper, ginger, and cinnamon. Add honey and lemon to taste—and snuggle up to part one of this special wintery edition of Don’t Remember Me Like This, beginning with “Winter in Minnesota.”
Winter in Minnesota
The past week, the temperatures have been in the negatives, four to ten below zero with a “real feel” windchill of negative 20-25 degrees. Recently, a heavy winter storm passed through and in some places it snowed up to ten inches—maybe not a lot, but enough to change the landscape dramatically. Muted by the fresh snow, the sound of the world has been down-tuned to a gray hush—a far cry from the cacophony of summer—everything is so pretty and dead.
All the garbage and dog shit in the neighborhood is covered in snow. There’s hardly any people out. Those who are out, are out for a reason. Even if they’re only out for a walk, they’re out for a walk. People move differently in these temperatures. They move with purpose. They cut a direct line to their destinations—grocery stores, hardware stores, or liquor stores—heads-down and hands jammed deep into pockets cutting over coarse mounds of sugar snow, directly there, picking up what they need, and hustling back to the car.
In this weather, there isn’t any room for funny business. You keep moving or you die, unlike the summer.
In the suffocating heat of summer, if you lift so much as a finger, you die. In the summer, there is only so much you can do to cool down. Even if you’re lucky enough to find a swimmable body of water, there’s only so long you can stay in the water before you have to get out of the water and become miserable again. But in the winter you can accessorize. You can add layers or get moving—you are in control.
I've stopped telling people how much I love the winter. It is an anecdote that, at best, elicits shock or skepticism, but in most cases, pitty. I suppose people suspect I’m being adolescently contrary or, more likely, that I’m a simpleton.
Here in Minnesota, there may be no faster way to out yourself as a newcomer to the midwest than to wax nostalgic about winter. On some level, I can see how—to anyone who sacrificed a good portion of their childhood to Minnesota’s winters—listening to some out-of-towner gushing about winter can be difficult to stomach. Several times I’ve been corrected about my admiration for this season, reminded about “this one winter” that was so cold, so long and dark and dreary it was just awful, just terrible and so totally awful and terrible that anyone who’d survived such a winter could never in their right mind look at winter with a kind eye ever again.
(If true, this would explain what makes Florida attractive to so many Minnesotans.)
I’ve been warned: If I haven’t yet lived through a winter that would make me think twice about winter, then I would in short order, and then I’d understand. I’ve heard this enough times that I’m beginning to suspect I could live in Minnesota for another 50 years and I could live through the worst winters and I would still never become a full-blooded Minnesotan—not without having surrendered a swath of my childhood to “that one winter.”
But who is native anywhere? In the universal perspective the most we can hope to become is familiar, maybe.
But in our own timeline, I wonder about the requisite qualifications to classifying oneself as part of the land? Does it mean staying put in one place? With one’s time on the land punctuated only by vacations? To be local, does one not need to do anything but merely survive? That seems like a pretty low bar. While I can respect the inherent ownership that comes with a lifetime of paying into local taxes, there is something to be said for the purposeful resident—the one who saw the place, even with its deadly winters and people who are notoriously difficult to befriend—and chose to live there anyway?
Swatty Cats
The other day, our dear friend Laura recalled a great quote she heard somewhere: That cats are great at teaching people about consent. Cats can change their mind on a dime, and that’s okay. Cats can re-change their mind just as quickly, and that too, is okay. Cats will let you know when they’re pissed off, the signs are not subtle. They train us to pick up on and to respect those cues. We can learn a great deal from cats, specifically in navigating relationships and boundaries with other, more human organisms.
We got our cats, David Rose and Bert Macklin, early last fall. And like all legendary romances, we did not immediately hit it off.
There was a lot of hissing. There was a period of adjustment that, I thought, was perhaps overly long. But eventually, the cats came out of their hidey hole in the basement. Soon, they were exploring our home, and (finally) coming around to the people that fed them.
Progressively, our bond with the cats grew until an equilibrium had been returned to the household. The cats even added an element of domestic bliss to the everyday goings on, what with the hot cuddles, surprise turns of affection, and underfoot playfulness they brought to the mix.
But that all changed when our houseguests arrived for the winter.
While we had established a hard-fought semblance of camaraderie with the cats, our poor houseguests were starting from square one. Again, there was a lot of hissing, a lot of skulking around and sniffing of the intruders. In spite of the obvious friendliness of our visiting friends and family, there were even a couple swipes that left marks.
When our friends Ross and Laura came to stay, the cats followed a predictable cat-trend I’ve noticed. They paid more attention and curiosity to the person who wanted distance, and outright hostility towards the one who just wanted to be friends.
For some reason, the arrival of any house guest sends the cats a scatter. We’d be playing a quiet board game and someone would laugh and the cats would be clinging to the ceiling.
Again, this probationary period of getting used to new voices and smells in the home went on for maybe a little too, until there was a breakthrough.
One day, David Rose was sunning himself up in the office. I’d come upstairs to fetch a thing and David called out to me, down the hallway.
“The hell do you want?” I asked him.
“Mrow?” he responded. Again he implored, “Mrowdrdrdr!”
Tentatively, I reached out to give him a little scritch. Enthusiastically, he returned the gesture purring loudly and winding himself around my hand and pushed his head into my chest for more. I held out my arms and he lept into the cradle, twisting luxuriously this way and that, responding with more warm purrs and head bonks.
And just then, downstairs, Ross laughed his big, echoing laugh.
David heard the laugh and tensed instantly. In the span of a second, he transformed from a warm blob of butterscotch pudding into an explosion of spinning cutlery. He sunk a claw deep into the side of my neck, and his other claws scratched a deep bloody ridge from the bridge to the tip of my nose. Just as quickly, he was purring again and pestering me for more scratches, ignoring that I was bleeding openly from my face.
It took some doing to dislodge the one claw from the side of my neck, it was in there pretty deep. Meanwhile, I could feel blood gushing from my nose and dribbling on my feet.
Eventually, sadly, our houseguests had to move on. And almost instantly, the cats returned to their old, loving selves. While I remain committed to loving our sweet cats and creating a warm, comfortable home for them, this episode was a sobering reminder that we’re living with wild animals. I love the cats dearly, and enjoy our time together immensely, but I am also aware they can turn on a dime and would happily pluck out my eyeballs in a heartbeat.
This is the unique brand of true love we are taught by our cats.
Midwest Socialism
Our first winter in this house, I threw myself into snow shoveling with adolescent abandon. In part because winter is a season of reckless and violent exercise (one has to get it where one can). But also, out of sheer determination, I wanted to establish a routine, a pattern and, over time, priorities to scooping the grounds.
That year, it snowed. And each time it snowed, I ran out there like an eager sailor on shore leave, repulsively early in the morning with my fancy-ass shovel at the ready. I did a good job too, although, in the process, I lost both the shovel and my arms. And my back, as it turned out. And my neck.
I blame the demise of the shovel on poor design. While its body was solid, attached to the lip was a strip of steel. The steel was thin and sharp. I chose that shovel because its lip looked imposing and deadly. But the fortified edge of the shovel turned out to be no match for the undulating terrain of our fucked driveway.
Because the fancy shovel scraped a little too well, it caught on every pebble and jutting hunk of asphalt. And with enough heave-ho behind the stem, the business end took quite a beating. In a matter of days the steel cutter transformed from a gleaming blade, into a sad gnarl that had seen things, and kept snagging and dragging on every uneven feature lurking beneath the deep snow.
For a while I limped along with this awful shovel until I couldn’t hold my arm out in front of me.
Eventually, thank Christ, that lip caught one snag too many. That particular lunge, I’d thrown in with all my thick hips and thighs. When the shovel seized asunder, the torque yanked the neck with a foreboding, splintering crack. Like twisting a crispy bunch of celery in half, the terrible shovel literally disintegrated in my hands.
I returned to Ace Hardware.
Loitering in the snow shovel aisle I felt like Indiana Jones in that third movie, the good one where he’s passing his hand over a myriad of goblets that may or may not be the holy grail. I was prepared to spend a little extra money, but not too much extra. Rather than choosing the most badass model, the flashy one with bluetooth, I was looking for a shovel that spoke to me.
I picked up several models and, in the too-tight aisle, gave the tools a heft this way and that, stabbing at imaginary drifts. I chose Big Blue because the lip was reinforced with teflon, not steel, which, as previously described, had been a spectacular flaw in the design.
I felt good about the purchase, optimistically confident. But you never know how the shovel will perform, in the field.
Immediately, I was surprised by the action. The shovel was designed with an aggressive swoop. It’s what initially caught my eye. The severe angle of the bucket seemed purposeful, and maybe even a little fun. But when punched into a snowbank, to my astonishment, the snow shot up from the ground in thick curlettes. Rather than piling up on the shovel, the snow flung forward as if hurled heavenward from a mechanical blower. Four or five of these lunges, and I’d built up a mound that was ready to scoop and heave.
That’s another thing I learned. Snow comes in all textures. And for most of them scooping the snow isn’t scoop-throw, scoop-throw, unless you’re eighteen and on mushrooms. For me at least, it’s lunge lunge lunge lunge, scoop, heave, and so on. Work smarter, not harder.
I tend to scoop either late at night or early in the morning. Although depending on the snowfall, it’s catch as catch can.
Should you scoop in the middle of a blizzard? It makes sense per square foot where only a certain depth of snow will fall. So either you can get it while the getting’s good, or you can wait for the sky to unload a dump, and try moving that instead.
I could just buy a snowblower and life would be so much easier.
Secretly, I’m green with envy for the snowblowing crowd. They’ve got it made, and is probably the reason some of them adventure sometimes five, even six houses from each side of their own property—just blowing snow—just walking behind their fabulous machine like they’re taking a shar pei puppy for an afternoon constitutional.
To convince myself away from buying a snow blower I imagine that, for the many solutions a snowblower provides, they could also create an equal number of conundrums.
I think of gasoline, for starters.
A full tank of gas will go rancid over the summer. And after a balls-hot summer, you try yanking that 4-stroke engine to life when you need it most, in the desperate depths of a freezing blizzard. Forget it. Instead of riding your high horse behind that snow blower, you’re having to tip your heavy, ungainly equipment upside down to empty out its gas (or however they get the gas out of there).
And then you’re just another schmuck at the gas station, filling a can.
This happened just the other morning. It was early, so my neighbor and I were the only ones out scooping. Or I was scooping and he was blowing snow, until gasping and sputtering, his blower died. Amid a chorus of profanity and after what must have been a half hour, the snowblower was eventually brought back to life, barely.
If I’m honest, I don’t care so much to scrape myself out of my hotpocket bed and trudge out into the weather to give the grounds what-for before sunrise. Especially when that means handing off the making of breakfast and a daughter who dislikes mornings to Jaclyn so that I can answer the call of neighborly responsibility before some idiot comes by and breaks their neck.
But let’s stop there for a second. What is it to answer the call?
Sometimes, there is a neighborhood. Sometimes the snow falls on that neighborhood. And even in the deadly early hours of the morning, or late at night, there’s some poor soul out there humping away at those sidewalks. And maybe even the upright folk are out there too, the know-betters who strut confidently behind their snowblowers. They’re out there, throwing-in just like everybody else.
Whatever approach we take, we all have a common goal: clear the public walkways.
We clear the stairs up to the mailbox because we don’t want the postal worker to slip and fall. We clear the weird little path from the sidewalk to the street because we’re the jerks who ordered double-A batteries from Amazon and some poor soul has to walk from their vehicle, up a path, to our house. We clear the sidewalks, and sometimes season them with expensive salts to help melt the ice.
Why?
Because we live in a community. That’s why. And in a community, this is where people walk. Like it or not, this puny little postage stamp of planet earth is our responsibility. The least can we do is make the land safe or, at the minimum, navigable for passersby.
Community. I think of that word as I am shoveling. (it keeps me humming along)
Shoveling snow is one of the rare pastimes that transcends politics. There are no democrat or republican snow shovelers. There are only neighbors, except for that libertarian grinch three houses down with the Gadsen flag in his front lawn. He refuses to shovel a single snowflake because to do so is somehow treading on a snake and it clearly says in the second amendment that we should not trample reptiles, or something.
In spite of what our lazy-ass libertarian neighbor might think, and even though it's a raging pain in the ass, shoveling snow is a god-given privilege. Think of it. We are rarely afforded the opportunity to contribute to a community that is bigger than ourselves, at so little cost, with so much to gain, and with so much exercise!
(Seriously, if the crossfit crowd knew what a Minnesota Winter could do for your core…)
I feel like I should reiterate my distaste for shoveling snow since, to speak too glowingly of the chore would be to invite a disastrous snowstorm that would really teach me a lesson. But I love shoveling snow in the Universal Perspective, what it means, and how it might help anyone, invited or not, to better enjoy, or more safely navigate the grounds to which I am steward.
We don’t do it because we get a prize. We don’t do it for recognition. We scoop snow because, simply, it’s just what you do.
This is what it means to shut up and get to work. And it wouldn’t kill you to smile while you’re out there, and maybe even wave hello to a neighbor.
Conclusion Part One:
Thank you for joining in this special winter edition of Don’t Remember Me Like This. Stay tuned for Part Two of Winter Vignettes including essays on:
The unfortunate specter of a frozen toilet
Thoughts on a recent break in, our second in only six months
How to make decorative ice lanterns
I’ve published the seventh vignette: “What Comes Next?!” On my Patreon account. If you’re a member, feel free to mosey on over there and give that a listen. If you’re not yet a member of the Don’t Remember Me Like This, I highly recommend you give it a try.
Until then, please, don’t remember me like this.