Neighborhood NewsLocal Culture

Make Snow Where You Can

Building Community

The winter landscape for the beginning of 2025, much like the winter landscape for virtually all of 2024, is bleak and barren. At best, there has been a light covering of snow, like a single bed sheet offered up as a replacement for a nice warm and thick comforter. Pull a comforter up around your head at bedtime and you know you are in for a pleasant, warm winter’s sleep in a way that a single bed sheet can never provide. Look out your window at a thick blanket of snow and the possibilities for enjoying winter are endless. A slight covering is like a mocking annoyance, teasing you with the reminder of what might be if only there was enough snow. For my wife and me, an outdoor activity that makes winter more than a season of endurance is cross-country skiing. The thin bed sheet covering the ground in early January only evokes sad memories of better days on freshly groomed trails.

A challenge now faced by many of us seriously disappointed in the past election is the feeling we are facing a long season of endurance. The promise of our nation’s first female President who is also a woman of color has been replaced with the barren landscape of a person whose misogyny is often worn as a badge of honor. On the record for both verbally and physically assaulting women, promising to “protect women whether they like it or not” are all part of the litany that turn this election outcome into a season of endurance. Addressing the very real problem of immigration by instigating fear and hatred toward Haitians as pet eaters, while promising to put in confinement camps millions of people who live among us fosters a despairing spirit of endurance. Denying the reality of climate change, while falsely laying the blame for explosive California fires on efforts at inclusion and diversity for first responders, creates longing for a warm thick comforter to pull over one’s head. Yet, like with winter in Minnesota, the season framed by Presidential elections is too long to simply endure. In spite of the bleakness and bareness of this landscape, there must be a better way than grinding it out in despair and resignation with the faint hope that someday a new season will come. 

It was the second week of January that my wife and I ventured over to St. Paul’s Battle Creek Regional Park with our cross country skis. Frequently after a fresh snowfall we enjoy heading down to Crosby Farm and the beautiful trails that take one through the woods and along the Mississippi River. But, Crosby like most other parks in the Metro area had little more than a light covering, nowhere near what is needed for skiing. Fortunately in 2024, the Metropolitan Council, Ramsey County and the City of St. Paul had joined forces to employ snow making machines at Battle Creek. Thanks to this freshly made snow, we were able to join many others, young and old, enjoying winter and an activity that makes this season much more than something to merely endure. 

The question those of who hoped for a different outcome in this past election might be asking is, what for us is the equivalent of a snow making machine? Even if much of the landscape around us looks bleak and barren, where can we invest ourselves, our time, our energy and resources to create spaces and places that make the next four years a season that is filled with meaning and joy? Snow making takes different shapes for different people. We can fill the bareness by being more intentional about time with family and friends, or volunteering in our neighborhood, congregations, community serving organizations like the Community Reporter and District Council, or by making our voice known to elected leaders through letters and phone calls. We create snow by simply resisting the tendency to treat one another as commodities in a transactional culture, but instead insisting all our interactions from the grocery store to the neighbor next door are informed by a spirit of kindness and generosity. Each of us can decide what shape and form our snow making machine will take. 

Trying to endure a winter that begins in early November and can last through all of March into early April is likely to turn one into a complaining grouch. It is no way to live. The same holds true for the season of national elections. A better option, a healthier option, an option that goes beyond mere endurance is to make snow where you can. 

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