It's Only Snow- Can We Live With That?

Mayo Brothers at Mayo Clinic before the storm

I live in Minnesota.
It gets cold in Minnesota.
It snows in Minnesota.

Can we live with that?

Sure, but first we have to freak out and describe the first snow of the season as something we think we have never seen before.

Turn on the news and we see

• the requisite stand-up with the MNDOT supervisor describing the newsworthy event of plowing the snow on the local highways
• the requisite stand-up along that local highway with car lights going behind the reporter (it is evening- and dark.)
• the social media posts that call this a "snowpocalypse" even though it is only forecast to be 6" - 10".

 The hype continues the next day when the snow failed to measure up to the upper end but was still enough to keep the first ten minutes of the newscasts filled with

• the requisite stand-up with along the local highway with car lights moving faster today
• the offbeat story of a milk-hauling truck sliding off a road
• the requisite story of front-end loaders plowing and gathering the snow from the streets of a small town
• the requisite story of the children sledding.

Then, with all this behind us, reminding us of how bad this storm was (but no serious injuries in the police report and only 8" of the white stuff), we get pictures of tornado damage and flooding in other parts of the country where people lost everything. Some even their lives.

Was it really all that bad here? No! I am moved to gratitude for the simple snowstorm we had. It was not any where near a snowpocalypse. I have lived through those on the east coast when winter Nor'easters dump a lot more than 8". But we survived even that!

In the lingo of news this story was NOT a man bites dog story. Let's keep our calm and our sense of perspective.

It was only snow.