The weather Aaron wished for the entire time we lived in New York arrives in full force, and it’s a character. Petulant, beautiful, roaring, and blindingly arctic, winter in Minnesota is the most histrionic of seasons. My friends back in New York wonder how we can do it, how we can live in such a dull place. I try to describe to them how the dramatics are high, but words fail to capture it.
For fun, we search the internet for places that we think might be colder than our own—Minsk, Moscow, Thunder Bay, Ketchikan—and then roll with delight when we beat them out by being lower. We are victorious! We realize that our location, about as far away from any temperate body of water as you can get, right in the bottom nipple of the Alberta Clipper, creates the ideal conditions for epic, record-breaking cold. And this first winter back is a bruiser, one that defies normal thermometers. Our smiles fade when we realize that the number on the thermometer appears to be stuck at ?40, because as the night goes on our world surely grows colder.
Despite the arctic winds, people in town still walk around with polite, ten-percent grins. They gently ask us what it is that we do back there, way out in the woods, with an unsaid Don’t you people have jobs? fluttering behind them. I’d forgotten about Minnesota-nice, too, but I come to a theory about it: The frigid winter wind supplies all the honesty and directness the local population can stand. It knocks everyone’s sharp observations sideways. The weather is meaner than mean, and after a while, there’s nothing you can do but greet it with a shallow smile.
On this wind, childhood memories begin to blow in. In the shine beaming off the bluish snow boulders I see another 25-below day, when my friends and I huddled in the basement of Rocky’s Pizza around the new Metallica song on the jukebox, the tingling bass like heartbeats in our heads, pounding relentlessly like our own teenage perseverance.
I see myself waiting for the bus with my brothers and the neighborhood kids, standing on a beaten-down pad of glittering snow sugar, wearing thin canvas shoes. The hair nearest to my head is still damp, my bangs are curled into a frothing surf, and the cold finds the moisture burning at my scalp. The air is sharp and crystalline, minty. The winter light comes at us from every direction, refracted in diamond cut every place it lands, until it appears that we are the lone humans standing in a white landscape and all of the world’s spotlights are trained right on us, a stiff clump of kids in the middle of nowhere.
The winter light is that bright, so bright there’s no safe place to look.
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Here’s the funny thing about going back to your hometown. You don’t just jump into the same old story. You step back into your shadow, but into a totally new narrative. You fold back the new page until it touches the old one, making a twin out of yourself, and then you have to walk around town like that, the old glued to the new. Mostly you forget about it, but then, every once in a while, you feel something flickering behind you, that jelly feeling of your former self.
I couldn’t have predicted it, because on the surface it defied common sense, but moving home had been in the cards for me for a long time—my stubborn nostalgia foreshadowed my path back. (And if Grandma Dion had ever dared to read my palm, she might have spotted it.)
My return has isolated the variables of my life in a valuable, almost scientific way. Standing in the same geographical spot, nearly twenty years later, I look at the landscape with new eyes. Only by freezing myself in place, I think, can I take an accurate measure.
It doesn’t escape me that only a native Minnesotan would think this.
I walk around town burrowed into my own head, gathering up memories with increasing affection, like it’s a pastime. On my way to the coffee shop, I see my dad driving past me at exactly 10:20, on his way to the post office to get the mail for the dealership, and I wave. He spots me through the windshield—in the way that all small-town residents look past the cars to their drivers—and waves back. I’m inflated with fondness and remind myself that when it comes to family relations, mundaneness is everything. The more insignificant the interaction, the better.
I drive down the wide Main Street, making a dramatic flip at the end of it to cruise back, this time not whipping the wheel like I would have in my youth but pulling out a smooth arc like an old-timer on a Sunday drive, taking it slow, because now I have a small boy in the backseat. And the boy is very hungry.
I never once thought, all the times when I was pregnant and glanced back at my unhatched imaginary kid in the backseat, that I’d ever drive that child through the fast-food drive-through window for a small order of fries, but now, in times of severe need, this is just what I do. I wryly remind myself that we do live, after all, in the fried-potato headquarters of the nation. French fries are a local food.
Through the haze of these thoughts, I make my way to the grocery store. When I pulled out my last bag of frozen smoked eggplant, I saw my freezer’s white bottom—the telltale sign of deep winter. My brother Marc must have liked the latest menu I’ve dropped on his answering machine—fancy meatloaf, more like paté, shell beans with chive oil, an undetermined vegetable, and smoked eggplant baba ghanoush to start—because he’s left me a voicemail. As with everyone in my family, he and I express our affection through the menus. He’s coming to dinner tonight.
I unclick the child car seat harness and pull Hank to my hip. The Red Owl my mom frequented gave way more than ten years ago to a larger chain; the biggest local store is now called J&B Foods (so named after its proprietors, Jeff and Bob) and it is by and large my winter larder. Open twenty-four hours and as large as a suburban big-box store, this grocery store has both the interests of the budget-conscious (baked beans by the gallon) and the cooped-up gourmet cook (Medjool dates) in mind. It has an encyclopedic selection of dry goods like powdered milk and masa and pasta, and plenty of meat, but a pretty hit-or-miss produce department. For example, no bitter greens to speak of—although the green beans look like an embittered bunch. I beg the produce manager to stock shiitake mushrooms, promising to buy all of them if he brings them in.
The produce manager assumes I’ve imported my pickiness from New York City, but little does he know that it was steeped in me locally. I inherited it from my mom, and she from hers.