Life is difficult enough as it is during Minnesota’s winters. Then try being Fambled. Have a partner who lives in a different city. Have four kids—some who are and some who are not related to each other by blood. Converge them at Grandma Donna’s house—which, by the way, is a small Linden Hills condo filled with breakable lamps.
Then dig out your car before the tow trucks come around, because it’s a Minneapolis Snow Emergency. And when I say “dig,” I mean DIG. DIIIIGGGGGG!
It’s all enough to make grownups stuff Kraft Macaroni & Cheese into their burgers. Why? Because it’s SOMETHING TO DO. And because it fills the existential hole in our bleak winter souls. And because we don’t want it to go to waste, do we? Have you looked outside? We could be here for days. The pioneers didn’t waste food, and THEY LIVED TO TELL ABOUT IT.
I’d say it doesn’t affect the kids, that their inability to focus on anything but the now makes them impervious to winter’s brutality, that their tiny kid-brains can’t deal with the space-time continuum and so they are unaware that it’s going to go on for three more months.
But there is evil glint behind the exuberance and you can really see it in the photos. Let’s just say that, in a stuck-in-a-ski-lodge-in-a-Stephen-King-novel kind of way, it scares me.
It would behoove all of us if you frequently called our cell phone numbers. Just for safety.
Don’t call the kids.
—Steph
