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We love the seasons! Oh, yes, we do!











You know something is wrong when your furnace
and your stove are your best friends.  Mine are.
They, or the escape from them and a run
to someone who has them, are the only reasons
why we, who live north, survive.

"I love living in a place that has seasons!"
I think I will hurt the next person who says that.
People who live in places like this say that
because they do not live in warmer places.

People who do not have nerve endings
are urged to go ice fishing--that is to say,
to bore holes through the ice on the lakes
and offer treacherous food to the stiff fish below--
because the ice and snow will kill them, anyway.
Some ice is OK.  Some snow is all right, too.
But too much of both suffocates them, anyway.

We are a hardy folk, we who live in the proximity
of ice and snow and Michele Bachmann,
but too much frozen ideology is life-threatening.

I have bought four more shear pins for the snow blower.
I have switched from Regular to Extraordinary gasoline.
I wear three shirts and padded shorts.  Still, I shrink.
My bladder feels like an empty plastic liner inside a box
of cheap wine, deflated by arctic air and resignation.

If there were a god, would he do this to us?
Would he, or she, or them, punish those of us who are good
just to provide frozen lessons to sinners who live in warm places?

I cannot believe it. Like the sainted Job and every other
confabulated believer, I believe that my greatest sin
is to have wished to be warm, even in winter,
and that I cannot accept that this is my fault:  having moved here.
Somehow, the universe has screwed up its justice system.

Does John McCain not live in Arizona?  What has he done
to deserve Colorado water and Budweiser beer?
John Boehner cries tears of sympathy for people
he does not give a damn about.  I freeze my arsche!

But I am now a Minnesotan.  We Minnesotans use
sheer pins for fuses.  We have shed our external appendices
for survival, and to lower health care costs.  We are fortressed
inside our iglood parkas, and (temporarily) we think ill of you.

But, stoutly, we love the seasons, as Job loved his boils!
It is our faith in ultimate goodness and justice and fairness
that is failing us.  Who planned it to be this way?

Must we blame ourselves for having moved here,
without warm-enough coats, and fool-proof furnaces?

We must.  We only want for someone to read the Constitution
to us again, leaving out the shameful parts, again--you know,
about 3/5th human beings, and uppity women non-voters,
and that stuff about alcohol not being necessary for survival.

But the state of the Union is strong!
It is the temperature that concerns some of us.

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