"I am a Feather for Each Wind that Blows" and Other Cheerful Thoughts

A chill wind drives leaden clouds across the sky. Trees wave their branches: beckoning, perhaps, for sunlight and warmth to return; or gesturing supplications against the boreal force.

It's been downright chilly in central Minnesota this week. Winds like this and highs in the sixties are fairly normal during autumn: but this is mid-July.

I should have said, "average during autumn". "Normal" in Minnesota covers a lot of ground. As they say: Minnesota doesn't have a climate: it has weather.

I think a writer overstated it a bit when, discussing "the future" (as imagined in 1964), he described living in Antarctica this way:

"...you too can take up residence in a barren desert of ice and snow where it's dark six months of the year and blizzards howl as they blast flesh-cutting shards of ice through the subzero air.

"A bit like living in Minnesota, actually." (Tales of Future Past, Futurama '64 (4), David S. Zondy)

There are, after all, many calm days during a Minnesota winter, and the sun is above the horizon for several hours. Of course, you can see the sun best on those days when it seems too cold for clouds to form.

My reason tells me that summer will return, along with blue skies and sunshine are not merely dim memories from another life; legends of an age when joy and laughter had not forsaken humanity, when wind and rain didn't have the ducks walking; tales recalling that epoch when I didn't have a cold.