We hit thirty below over a stretch of days this past winter, not counting wind chill, actual air temperature, and I want to be clear that I moved here from somewhere milder as an adult, so this is not a native Minnesotan’s relationship with cold, this is a person who chose this and occasionally regrets the choice out loud to Marcus, who has heard versions of this complaint every January for years and no longer really responds to it.

There’s a specific quality to a day that cold that I didn’t understand until I’d lived through a few of them, which is that everything gets smaller. My commute, which is normally a fifteen minute drive I don’t think about, becomes an actual logistics problem, is the car going to start, do I need to plug the block heater in, did I remember. The walk from the parking ramp at the hospital to the building entrance, maybe ninety seconds on a normal day, turns into something you brace for like it’s a real event. People I work with who are usually chatty in the hallway just nod and keep moving, everyone’s conserving something, not just warmth, some kind of general capacity for extra effort that the cold eats first.

What I didn’t expect, moving here, is how much I’d end up liking this specific texture of the year, not despite the smallness but because of it. There’s a permission in genuinely brutal cold that I don’t get the rest of the year, permission to not do things, to cancel plans without guilt, to treat the couch and a blanket as a legitimate destination for an entire evening rather than something to feel lazy about. Thursday game night got cancelled twice this winter because Ines wouldn’t drive in it and I don’t blame her one bit, the roads were bad enough that the hospital sent a memo about non-essential staff staying home, which never happens.

I went out anyway, on one of the actual thirty-below mornings, just to the co-op two blocks over for coffee, mostly to see what it felt like, which sounds absurd typing it out now. It felt like my face hurt within about ninety seconds and like the air itself had a texture, dry and sharp in a way that doesn’t quite translate if you haven’t felt it. I bought coffee I didn’t need and walked home fast and felt, honestly, a little proud of myself for a completely unremarkable errand, which is maybe the whole point of a place like this. It recalibrates what counts as an accomplishment.

I don’t know that I’d recommend this climate to anyone who isn’t already here for other reasons. But four winters in, I’ve stopped counting the cold as a cost of living here and started counting it as part of what living here actually is.