Saturday, December 21, 2013

Season's greetings, but what season?

By Jim Heffernan
Duluth MN: Treacherous winter storm on December 4, 2013.
(Photo by Derek Montogomery for MPR News)

Well, the big holiday looms.

As I venture out each morning to get the newspaper and mail, I walk through a canyon of snow banks, some of them taller than I.

Briskly walking through the canyons of snow, braving sub-zero temperatures, I’ve been thinking that this white winter scene is precisely what people from other parts of the country think it is like in Duluth all the time.

When I travel to other parts of the country – almost always to the south of here – and tell people where I’m from, they usually respond by saying things like, “Brrrr, it’s cold up there.” People in Minneapolis-St. Paul react that way. Never mind the people way down south. To them, these conditions are unimaginable. 
Duluth MN: Famous Halloween Storm of 1991
Duluth News Tribune photo, on MPR web site:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/bigstory/archive/2011/10/halloween-blizzard-was-no-treat.shtml
It’s a perception thing that Duluth can’t fight. We might as well just accept it.

So let me just take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy Fourth of July.

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