Jan 25 - In these Winter Lands

It's a beautiful sunny day today but it wasn't that way two nights ago. I had dinner at Cosetta's, a great Italian deli and eatery in downtown St. Paul with my dad that night. Driving home afterwards, out of the city, I decided to take the back country roads to get home. There was a crazy wind whipping up, and as I got out of the city the wind began to bring snow.

Big white snowflakes, lots of them, were blowing horizontally, and I was driving directly into the wind. That creates a great effect that anyone who has lived in a snowy land will know. In the dark night, with the headlights on, all the little points of white zoom at the car, giving a vertigo-like sensation of driving into a vortex (when I was a kid I said it was like the beginning of the Star Wars movies, where the stars rush towards the camera). Around me, visible through the dark of a countryside night, were snow-white fields and forests glowing with a dim chilled moonlight. The fields were in motion, with swirls of snow rushing and swirling in the wind. It was winter, a true Minnesota sensation. Though most of my life I have detested winter, at this moment it seemed exhilarating, snowy, cold, icy and wild. Something that will always impress and humble mankind, not the other way around.