Home for a Holiday

I went home to my parents house in Rochester, Minnesota for Thanksgiving. While waiting at baggage claim I got an email from a former coworker, who wrote:  “Pretty cold there right now, huh?”

Actually, for the first four days, it wasn’t bad. Middays were sunny and nice, for November. For instance, I never put on the gloves, even while going for walks outside, and frequently didn’t bother to put on a coat for short periods outside. On Thanksgiving itself, it started to rain—which weather I wished I could have beamed home to the Sierras—if not to our yards.

But late Thanksgiving afternoon the rain turned to snow, the flakes growing thicker and bigger, which was magical, as the cold front slowly moved in. I had to run an errand early Saturday morning, and went outside to find the car under a few inches of snow, with the windows frosted over.

Mrs. Ombud had chosen a “cute” little blue Chevy Spark for us. Economical, but not much room for luggage. Only room for one suitcase in the back, and I was so focused on fitting in our four pieces of luggage that I barely noticed the ice scraper on that flimsy little felt-coated compartment cover in back. In fact, in conversation my sister mentioned that every Minnesota rental car her family had driven had an ice scraper. Curious, the same day, I checked our glove box and the front compartments—no scraper.

So at 7 am on a very still, snowy, and beautiful Saturday morning, limbs of trees outlined in snow, I got out a credit card and got to work. The windows were frosted in pretty good. I turned the engine and the defroster on to start warming the windshield, and began scraping the rest, working fast to clear them, getting halfway around the car before the brain cells kicked in: idiot, the ice scraper was there in the back, not the front. Curiously, the scraping edge of the scraper wasn’t much wider than the credit card, so it wasn’t that much faster. But at least my hands were farther away, as while using the credit card the flying frost had chilled my fingers.

Three quarters of the way around I realized how cold my fingers were getting. My first thought was: I can finish this without the gloves. How lazy can you be, to not want to go to the effort of stopping a task and setting down a tool to get the gloves out of your coat pockets? But my next thought was this: If I don’t warm up  my hands now, they’re going to get even colder while I drive, before the interior warms up.

So I stopped and put on the gloves. My fingers warmed up right away.

I had to laugh at myself. That follow-up thought was total Minnesotan. We learn early to protect our extremities in cold weather: feet, hands, heads. Think ahead. How long are you going to be outside? Years ago a poor shivering patient at the Mayo Clinic waited in a heavy coat at a corner of a Rochester intersection for the light to change. He glanced over and saw someone I knew in his shirtsleeves. Even mid-shiver, the poor guy convulsed, muttering, “Damn natives.”

Still cracks me up. I left the state a long time ago, and you can take the boy out of Minnesota, but …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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