The air will taste clean and sharp. The sun will sparkle on the fresh white powder. You'll wave to your neighbors, all out with their snowshovels and snow throwers and roof rakes. You shovel your sidewalk and driveway. By the time you return from work in the evening, the thin layer of snow that your shovel couldn't get up will have evaporated directly into the air without melting, even at temperatures many degrees below zero.
Within a day or two, the sidewalks will be perfectly dry while mountains of snow will remain on either side. At night, the moisture will sometimes crystalize out of the air as it is cooling making fluffy spangles that materialize seemingly from the stars and which settle softly onto the ground.
It'll take forever to clean the layers of snow off your car and you will run the heater full blast all the way to work, causing the remaining snow to run down your windshield in rivers. With any luck, as you pull out onto the street, you won't get stuck in the ruts of snow, deeper than your boot-tops where the plow has yet to reach.
Minneapolis has a complex plowing schedule that involves color-coded street signs, alternating the first side of the street plowed each year, a lot of moving your car from one location to the next to avoid getting ticketed, all resulting in a three-day cycle to clear the streets after a storm. In the meantime, you learn to drive through snow, on packed snow, and on snow that has hardened into ice. Except for the main roads, you'll be driving on packed snow and ice all winter.
Xerxes Avenue, my street, is a snow route and always plowed first. And the alley behind my house is also plowed by a road grader immediately after a storm. This pushes the carefully shoveled snow back into driveways up and down the block, leaving a hard bump for cars to bounce over when pulling into their garages. But clear alleys are vital for fire and utility trucks to pass through. And garbage trucks.
My route to work goes past Lake Calhoun, frozen solid by this time of year, solid enough to put ice fishing houses on, and even in the coldest winters, to drive vehicles onto. On the weekends, people bring their dogs to run on the frozen lake and their kids to run and fly kites. On nearby Lake Harriet, a portion of the ice by the bandshell is cleaned off for ice skating.
Hennepin Avenue is a main street connecting the Uptown neighborhood near Lake Calhoun with downtown Minneapolis. One of the more spectacular sites any time of the year is approaching downtown with the Walker Arts Center and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden on one side, Loring Park on the other and directly ahead, the Basilica of Saint Mary, which according to its sign, is America's first Basilica.
Past the Basilica is the beginning of downtown. The tallest building on the right in the picture above is the IDS Center, 50 stories high and the tallest building in Minneapolis, in Minnesota and in the Upper Midwest. Although I never could be too sure about this, I have heard many times it is the tallest building between Chicago's Sears Tower and the West Coast. At street level along Nicollet Mall, there is a statue of Mary Richards, the character played by Mary Tyler Moore on TV for many years. The Mary Richards house still exists at Lake of the Isles just south of downtown. The statue is placed on the spot where Mary tosses her beret during the opening song.
When the statue was dedicated in 2002, I read that the newsroom that Mary supposedly worked in was actually the building I worked in: One Financial Plaza at 120 South Sixth Street. This building was the first major skyscraper in Minneapolis built after World War II and was the tallest in the city during the 1960s and until the IDS Center opened in 1974.
And here is South Sixth Street. I always think that this is one of the more dramatic streets in the city with the canyon of buildings and the skyways criss-crossing the street on each block. The skyways connect the major downtown buildings on the second floor which creates two parallel worlds of commerce: the one at street level which you can see from the sidewalks and cars, and the one hidden in the skyway level building lobbies which are a frenzy of activity at lunch time during the week.
The skyways are so extensive and inter-connected that lunch time walking clubs follow round-about trails that can encompass several miles. Even in the dead of winter, many people do not wear coats to work: they get in their cars parked in garages attached to their homes, drive to work, park in a heated garage in their office tower, go to work, shop, bank, run errands through the skyways at lunch, and return home again without ever having been outdoors. I've heard people refer to the skyways as habitrails, named after the plastic tubes and cages for gerbils and hamsters.
Still even with the habitrails, people sometimes venture out onto the streets to dart across the icy roads and maneuver around the giant snowpiles in a hurry to get out of the cold.
