snow in san francisco

'They' say it might snow in San Francisco tomorrow. It has not snowed in SF since 1976.  In 1976, there was enough snow to give kids back then a chance to make a few snow balls, to see the ground covered in snow for a few hours.  That is so different than snow in Minneapolis.

In Minneapolis, it snows quite a lot. Most people know this, I think.  But everyone doesn't realize that the snow tends to stay, and just keep piling up throughout the winter.

I grew up in Chicago, where it snows every year, sometimes a foot or more.  But no matter how much it snows in Chicago, most of the snow melts away within a few days. It remains a few weeks at the most, and even when it remains a few weeks, it is only on the grass, and not very high.  Snow barely has a chance to get dirty and form a hard crust and, poof, it's melted away. It's still freezing, but the snow does not hang out and pile up.

Whereas in Minneapolis (and other cities in MN, of course), the snow rarely melts away completely during the winter. Sure, there is typically a January thaw, enough warmer days to get everything a little goopy. The January thaw tends to mess up the outdoor ice rinks and the cities don't usually regroom the ice rinks so after the January thaw they are lumpy. But folks still ice skate.


In Minnesota cities, the snow piles and piles. And after it is shoveled and stacked up, the piles get pretty high. A week or two of January thaw is not enough to melt these piles away. And the city grit tends to make them gray.  Fresh snow gives everything a fresh look.

I had a garden when I owned a house in Minneapolis, a three-story Victorian surrounded by closely-packed three-story Victorians.  I lived in a rare patch of Minneapolis that is actually on the National Historic Register because the original developers got a zoning variance to build houses much more densely than is typical in the Midwest. In most of Minneapolis, there would be two rows of houses on a block, with a street surrounding the double rows, and an ally down the middle, 'behind' the houses, whose front doors would face the street. But my littleilw