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Minnesotans are funny folks. Sure, we may on occasion publicly express a wish for mild winters and gripe about face-numbing cold weather, but we don’t really mean it. Not really. In January, when a national meteorologist points to International Falls on the map and slowly shakes his head in pity and disbelief, our chests really do swell with Minnesota pride. Mine does anyway. I know yours does too. No sense lying to yourself. It’s o.k. to admit it.

We’re a very hearty, proud people and firmly believe that truly nasty winter weather does indeed effectively separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. How many of us have nodded our head in assent while listening to a wimpy weather whiner and thought, “Well, if you don’t like the weather, why don’t you just move then? Hmm? I’m sure Texas or Florida would love to have you.” We’d like nothing more than to say just that, but we are, after all, “Minnesota nice,” so we keep these thoughts to ourselves.

The heavy snowfall that hit us late Sunday and early Monday was nothing short of an affirmation of why we choose and love to live here in Minnesota. We all got up a bit earlier than usual on Monday, most of us watching the expanding list of school and work closings crawl across the bottom of our T.V. screens and collectively muttering, “C’mon, be closed, be closed, be closed…c’mon, snow day!”

If you have kids or are a kid at heart, you know that waking up to a foot of snow is the ultimate winter experience. Our kids wanted to run out and play in the white stuff before the sun was up. Our three-year-old, Augie, actually had his boots and snowsuit in hand before my wife and I reminded the boys that they were still in their pajamas and hadn’t eaten breakfast yet. Later in the morning, it was really neat to have a bunch of neighborhood kids over to our house, sledding, building snow forts and having a genuine, old-fashioned snowball fight.

I count ourselves fortunate to have neighbors that don’t think a thing of sending their little urchins down the street to engage in a snowball fight. Why, for a couple of hours there, we had a little slice of bygone Americana right there in our backyard. Yes, the scene brought back some good memories of my own childhood and it looked a lot like the way things used to be: a time before we all began protecting our kids from absolutely every eventuality that life could throw their way. At one point during the heated snow battle, a neighbor kid, Wyatt, came into our house with his mom. Wyatt had his head tipped backward and his mom asked for a tissue that she could ball up and stuff inside a nostril. Evidently Wyatt banged his melon on a sled that was used to reinforce his fort and bloodied his nose. There was no crying. Nobody went home. Mom stuffed a hunk of Kleenex in there and Wyatt ran off to do more battle. By gosh, there may be hope for our future after all.

Dan Brown’s weekly outdoor column is brought to you by Frankie’s Bait and Marine, in Chisago City, and St. Croix Outdoors, in St. Croix Falls, Wis.

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