Where Did Summer Go?

It's good to be back in the saddle, so to speak, after a nice, long vacation. When it started near the end of September, we were having a stretch of Indian Summer. It was great, because we had such a slow-starting, cool one this year. But the seasons do roll and winter in Minnesota is inexorable. When I posted a note on my wall on Facebook about the snow we got just a few days into October, one of my friends who lives in Georgia had to tease me that he thought we should be shoveling paths through the snow banks by now. Another friend from Minnesota teased me about waxing poetic. She's a native and I'm not, so I had to defend my delight at the sight of the season's first offerings. Her comment jogged my memory about a poem I wrote almost four years ago now. I dug it out to share it with you. For my warm-blooded, southern friends, here's a glimpse of what it's like to be knee-deep in the powder. To my cold-blooded, "It ain't cold 'til it hits 40 below!" north star state friends - you know you love it, too. For the first month anyway....

The Vagaries of Snow

It comes down in giant flakes, sideways
It comes down as glitter, shiny
It comes down hard, blinding
It comes down
It piles up

We push it off the driveway with our shovels
The snowplow driver pushes it into the driveway with the plow
The wind pushes us around - the devil!
Doubling the cold
But helping us throw the snow