I first fell in love with Minneapolis in the snow. Not just in the winter, when there was the usual Minnesota build up - the falling snow. For lack of a less cliche way to say it, there's something just magical about it. My city, she wears it well.
Tonight, driving toward the skyline with the fluff barreling down on a highway cast in the haze of red tail lights from overly-cautious drivers, I was reminded of that feeling. The blissful, warm, simmering love that stirs up when you've forgotten but are reminded; the little bubbles of I don't think I'll ever leave you, rise to the surface and burst, like an exhale.
Magic.
See, I was a suburb kid. My magic was in long, windy roads with no sidewalks or curbs, houses of all kinds that had big green yards. It was in the creek you could lost in, just a ten minute walk from my house. It was in smiley, sweet old neighbors who gave us candy and we never once questioned them. I never thought outside of my safe little world, knowing from a young age how to get from one edge of town to the next. And if all else failed, beauty could always be found at midnight, in the dead of winter, looking up at a star-filled velvet.
I had, of course, been to the city long before I fell in love with it. I guess it goes the way of many love stories; I didn't even like it at first. It scared me - intimidated, is the right word. I didn't understand the appeal to broken glass, worn-down buildings, or the crowded-ness. I think it rocked my comfortable little ways, in a manner I didn't quite appreciate.
This is not to say I didn't like getting out of the little 'burban bubble. We traveled, when I was growing up; mostly to places with even more nature, and less signs of man than the quaint neighborhood where we lived. The great exception was New York, whose - looking back on it - greatness I was too young to fathom. The If I Can Make It Here brand outshines my actual memories of the city ten years later. I'd really never thought of myself as a city girl.
Fast-forward only a few years from that trip to New York, and I laid eyes on what stole my heart: a gritty, tough city beautifully masked in an increasing dusting of a purifying white. And that was when I knew, this is a place I love and always will. Even my first stint living here, (and on my own) my courtship, if you will, began in winter. There's something so disarming to me about this city in a fresh and building snow. It's suddenly so quiet and peaceful, and all its flaws and blemishes are hidden away, under a sparkle.
It's my running joke in the winter that I don't know why we live here. The truth is even though I don't believe in luck, whenever it snows in Minneapolis and I get even a glimpse of it, my heart races and I think, I'm so lucky to live here; this is why I live here.
