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A Sign that the End is Near, if not Already Behind Us

Thinking to check the mail box, I shoveled the walk out to the street.  No mail.  Not much snow, either.  It has not been a brutal winter, so far, just a damnably irritating one.  


We have, perhaps, three inches of snow.  Last winter, we received seven feet of snow, in all.  I know about Cordova, Alaska:  15 feet since November!  But we do not live in Alaska.  We live here, just a plane ride north of the temperate zone.  We cannot even get to Alaska from here because of the shale oil spills and tar sand strip mining between here and there, which make for heavy sledding.  If Nome needs serum, and it has to be delivered by dog sled, it isn't coming from Minnesota.  We might find a way to airlift corn cobs.  


It took me half an hour to drive two miles, this morning, on my way to the coffee shop.  It was a tad slippery because a bit of rain had fallen and frozen before it began to small-snow, but it ought not to have brought traffic to a creep.  It did.  


Our presidential aspirants are coming home to roost.  Tiny Tim Pawlenty has not taken a presidential position on snow, either.  He only backs winners like Mitt Romney.  Our Belle, Michele Bachmann, is rumored to be back in Stillwater, which is about as close to Washington D.C. as one can get in Minnesota, but she has not had time to consult with the Almighty about weather, what with clarifying how she and God feel about gay marriage, and the coming of the Lord, and final tribulations, and all that.  "All that" is a code name for Marcus Bachmann, I think.  He is hard to classify.


As you know, it is not the depth of the snow that matters most, nor the wind chill, either.  It is what winter does to the mind.  It drives one to reading cook books, and trying things.  It drove me to trying Spam and Vegetable soup.  After all, Spam is produced right here in Minnesota, where Michele Bachmann was bred, if not born.  She was born in Iowa, on the other side of Spam.  I would like to think of it as a fit of nostalgia, but I fear that trying Spam soup might be something like snow blindness, or howling madness.  I fully expect that hardened Minnesotans will put me out on the ice, someday, to face the polar bear alone, finally.  


Maybe going to the chapel at Carlton College for a funeral has gotten to me.  Maybe Spam and Vegetable soup is just another sign of the end times.  

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