I finally broke down and bought a face mask.
Stella and I were walking home when the wind smacked us in the face. We stopped, had an “oh hell nah” moment, and went to the Mountaineering store near the law school.
I bought the face mask for $20 and a thermal hat and neck band for $2 each.
The low tonight is -20. According to the local news, tonight is Minneapolis’s coldest night in five years.
The news coverage of the weather is hilarious:
Perhaps all the national attention actually makes us content: The rest of you, you don’t know cold like we know cold. We’ve got salt. We’ve got snowplows. We’ve got stoicism. We can handle it.
The best part of the story was this:
Zielske, who likes to say she “married into this weather,” said her parents love calling her from Nevada to tell her the Twin Cities weather forecast.
“They’re more obsessed with my weather than I am,” she said. “They have no Minnesota connection — they were born and raised in British Columbia and then moved to the Pacific Northwest, and now they live in Las Vegas — but I think they like to gloat that they have a child who is managing to exist in what they consider this kind of deathly, unfriendly, inhuman terrain that we call home.”
My mother does that too! She lives in Miami but is always aware of the Minneapolis weather. She’ll call from the beach and ask, “Is it cold enough for ya?”
I still love Minnesota. Seriously. But tonight you can find me inside, in bed, under 4 blankets, wearing a sweater and two pairs of long johns.