The blank space on the computer screen has been mocking me for about an hour. At least five times, I’ve typed something, looked at it, and then deleted it. For some reason – perhaps because of the madness beyond our walls, perhaps because of a weariness that seems to have found its home in me overnight – I have nothing to say this morning.
Here’s Fotheringay’s take on Bob Dylan’s “Too Much Of Nothing.” It’s from the group’s self-titled 1970 album, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.
I looked out the window first thing this morning, and I heard Boz Scaggs’ voice in my head, with the faux Boz changing one word:
“And now the snow begins, and it may never end . . .”
This week’s edition of the snow to end all snows crept into southern and southwestern Minnesota around midnight and is slowly making its way northeast across the state. It’s before eight in the morning as I write, and we’ve gotten a dusting so far, less than an inch, I’d guess.
Before it’s all over sometime this evening, we’re supposed to get anywhere from four to eight inches of new snow. That’s less than they’ll get in the Twin Cities, which is more near the center of the storm track, and unless the storm veers suddenly, I’m guessing our total will be right around six inches.
Still, that will be the largest snowfall of the season, and it will – I believe – make this February the snowiest February ever recorded in St. Cloud.
And we’ve had plenty of warning, what with weather folk on television tracking the major systems across the country for the past week. As we watched television last evening, the lists of school districts closed for the day scrolled past, and the Texas Gal commented on them. Being a Minnesota native, I told her that schools had in the past closed for the following day when a storm was bearing down, adding that announcing the closings the evening before gave working parents time to plan for themselves and their kids.
Of course, the three- to four-day warning of a major storm allowing such planning is a relatively new phenomenon, the product of the late satellite age. That was the case about eight years ago when we had three-day warning of a Christmas-time blizzard that stranded us in our house on the East Side for a couple of days. But this morning I’m thinking back to two of the major winter storms I recall, and there wasn’t nearly as much warning for them.
In October 1991, Minnesotans were still celebrating the baseball Twins’ victory in the World Series on Sunday when the weather indicators showed by mid-week a storm coming in Thursday night or Friday morning. I was new at the Eden Prairie News, located in a second-ring suburb in the southwest corner of the Twin Cities, and as I saw the winds whipping around on Thursday afternoon, October 31, I called over to the high school to see if the volleyball match I’d planned to shoot that evening was still scheduled.
“Yes,” said the activities secretary. Then she asked if I were new to Minnesota, wondering if I’d just moved from some less snowy place.
“No,” I told her. “I was born here, and I just have a sense about this one.”
I shot the volleyball game, and drove home in heavy snow, one of the few cars on the Interstate highway that evening. The snow continued falling through Friday, with most of Minnesota shut down, through Saturday and into Sunday. Wikipedia tells me that the Twin Cities received 28.4 inches of snow, which set a record for a single storm in the Metro area.
I hunkered down in my apartment in the northwestern suburbs, venturing out only on Saturday to walk to the hardware store in the adjacent block to replace my coffee maker, which had helpfully given up the ghost on Friday evening. No one went anywhere on Monday, and on Tuesday traffic crawled through the morning rush hour and life went on.
I don’t think we had even three days of warning in January 1975 (or perhaps I, a college student at the time, was oblivious to the warnings), when the snow – whipped around by wind – began to fall around noon on a Thursday. Wikipedia says the snow began on Friday, but I know darned well that the St. Cloud State campus was closed on Thursday afternoon and that the snow was so heavy by then that my friend Larry, who lived in Elk River – thirty-five miles away – turned around on the edge of St. Cloud and stayed with us until Tuesday.
We got about eighteen inches of snow in that one, but the wind created drifts as high as six feet in the street just north of us and much larger than that out in the country. We stayed in most of the time, though Larry and I did venture out during a lull Saturday, walking through deep snow to the nearby Dew Drop Inn for a pitcher of beer – the owners lived in a house attached to the back of the tavern – and then stopping by Rick’s house, where a few of his school friends had gathered. After a few spirited rounds of the card game Pit, Larry and I trudged back across Kilian Boulevard.
Snow came in again Sunday, and we stayed in, spending three dismal hours of the day watching the Pittsburgh Steelers defeat the Minnesota Vikings 16-6 in the Super Bowl. On Monday, I walked the windy mile or so to school to man the circulation desk at the St. Cloud State library. Even with the chilly walk, I got the better of the deal, as Larry ended up helping Dad shovel the walks and paths and clear snow from the roof of the house.
And on Tuesday Larry happily headed home, and once again, life slowly lurched back to normal.
I doubt that this week’s storm will be as disruptive, but if I were one of those who were out on work or errands today, I’d be keeping an eye on the weather and planning to cut short my time away from home. That’s what the Texas Gal is likely to do today: She has some flex hours available, so she’s probably coming home during the midafternoon. And if we’re snowed in tomorrow, well, we’ve got some television shows to binge-watch.(And a quick look out the window tells me that the snow has become appreciably heavier in just the forty minutes it took me to put this post together.)
Here’s the British folk-rock band Fotheringay with a suitable tune for today. The band, Sandy Denny’s project after she left Fairport Convention, released a single self-titled album in 1970. Though brief, the evocative “Winter Winds” is one of my favorites on the album.
There’s just too much of everything today. Too much left on my to-do list for the week. Too much canning season chaos in the kitchen (the season is, thankfully, winding down). Too much time spent early this morning waiting for sleep to take me away from the latest Stephen King novel (titled, ironically, Doctor Sleep).
The Texas Gal is off at a quilting class at one of the local emporiums, and I have errands to run in a dreary and damp midday. I feel adrift and unfocused, but if someone were to ask me “What’s wrong,” I’d likely just mutter, “Well, nothing really.”
But it is, as Bob Dylan’s song goes, too much of nothing. (“Send them all my salary on the waters of oblivion . . .”) And that allows me an easy out this morning. Here’s a 1970 performance by the British band Fotheringay – including the brilliant Sandy Denny – of Dylan’s “Too Much Of Nothing,” and it’s today’s Saturday Single.
Originally posted December 5, 2007
Through the window, I hear the skrik-skrik of someone scraping ice from a vehicle in the parking lot. We got another six inches of snow yesterday afternoon (on top of the six or so inches from Saturday), and it came in the afternoon, causing havoc during what passes for rush hour here in St. Cloud.
It looks like this winter is going to be a tougher one than the past few have been. At least, it’s starting out that way, with two six-inch snowfalls in four days and another storm heading our direction for tomorrow. The past few years haven’t seen much snow at all, and it’s generally come later in the season. And some of those winters have seemed to bring fewer days of sub-zero cold, the kind of cold that makes snow squeak under your feet and makes your cheeks burn.
Were winters colder when I was a kid? I don’t know. I remember walking in some pretty cold weather during my elementary school days. For the seven years I went to Lincoln School (kindergarten through sixth grade), I walked the five blocks from Kilian Boulevard to the school almost every day. On those winter days when the wind came from the north or northwest, we’d turn around and back our way to school, whole clusters of kids walking in reverse along Fifth Avenue Southeast.
(One very clear recollection that points out how times have changed is that the girls were still required to wear skirts or dresses in school. They could wear slacks under their dresses or skirts when they walked to school, but those slacks had to come off once they got inside.)
On very frigid days, those snow-squeaking days when the temperature was at twenty below zero or colder (that’s about twenty-nine degrees below zero Celsius), my mom or dad would drive us – my sister was three years ahead of me – the five blocks to school, often picking up classmates of ours along the way. And on occasion during my first few years of elementary school, I’d get a ride to school from Ed, the college fellow who lived in the next block and was the quarterback for the St. Cloud State Huskies football team.
Do kids still walk to school in any season? I don’t know. I do have a sense that kids no longer do as much outdoors as we used to do. Forty years ago, there were two city-maintained outdoor skating rinks within walking distance of our house: one right across the highway from Lincoln School (with a walking bridge over the highway providing easy access), and another about six blocks south of us on Kilian Boulevard. I was never a very good skater, but I spent my time with Rick and the other neighborhood kids scuffling around the two rinks. And on occasion, we’d go downtown where the city maintained a skating surface on Lake George.
And once every couple of weeks, we’d grab our saucer sleds and head down to the big hill in Riverside Park for a weekend afternoon of sliding, coming home cold and wet, tired and happy.
The rink on Kilian is long gone now, its location having become part of a permanent rose garden. I don’t think there’s a rink near Lincoln anymore. The open area that was flooded each winter is still there, but the warming house is long gone. And the old warming house on Lake George came down years ago, too. I suppose kids who want to skate do so in the ice arenas that were built during the years I was gone.
I would imagine, though, that kids still slide down the hill in Riverside Park. I hope so. And this year, it looks as if there will be plenty of snow for them.
“The First Chill of Winter” by Boo Hewerdine & Darden Smith from Evidence, 1989
“Winterlude” by Bob Dylan from New Morning, 1970
“A Hazy Shade of Winter” by Simon & Garfunkel from Bookends, 1968
“Song of Winter” by Françoise Hardy from One Nine Seven Zero, 1970
“Winterlong” by Neil Young, unreleased, 1974
“Wintery Feeling” by Jesse Winchester from A Touch On The Rainy Side, 1978
“The Coldest Winter in Memory” by Al Stewart from Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time, 1996
“In The Winter” by Janis Ian from Between the Lines, 1975
“Song For A Winter’s Night” by Gordon Lightfoot from The Way I Feel, 1967
“The Winter is Cold” by Wendy & Bonnie from Genesis, 1969
“Lion in Winter” by the Bee Gees from Trafalgar, 1971
“Winter Winds’ by Fotheringay from Fotheringay, 1970
“Sometimes In Winter” by Blood, Sweat & Tears from Blood, Sweat & Tears, 1969
A few notes on some of the songs and artists:
I’ve posted the Hewerdine and Smith album Evidence here before, but I could not resist starting this list with “The First Chill of Winter,” which is one of my favorite songs.
The album One Nine Seven Zero, the source of French chanteuse Françoise Hardy’s “Song of Winter,” was originally released in 1969 in South Africa under the title of English 3. A year later, it was released in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand as One Nine Seven Zero. In the U.S. and Canada, the album’s title was Alone. I don’t think there’s any difference between the albums, but the source I had for the album called it One Nine Seven Zero, so that’s what I’ve called it.
The Neil Young track, “Winterlong” was included on Decade, his 1977 retrospective. The only other place the song shows up officially is on the 2006 release, Live at the Fillmore East, which documents a 1970 performance by Young with Crazy Horse.
Gordon Lightfoot’s “Song For A Winter Night” may be more familiar in a version by Sarah McLachlan. Her nicely done cover of the song was released on the soundtrack of a 1994 remake of the Christmas film, Miracle on 34th Street, although the recording was not used in the film.
“The Winter Is Cold” comes from one of the more remarkable one-shot recordings of the 1960s. Genesis came from San Francisco-based sisters, Wendy and Bonnie Flowers, who were seventeen and thirteen, respectively, at the time. It was released on the Skye label, which folded soon after the record came out, dooming any chances for the record to gain any attention. “The Winter Is Cold” is one of the lesser tracks on the album, I think, but the album – re-released on the Sundazed label in 2001 with bonus tracks – is worth finding.
Echoes In The Wind Archives 