Its audacity is repaid with snow. Lots of it. Two feet here. Six inches there. Fifty inches in three days.
Plows slice through, leaving a wintry, geological stratum.
The top of the snow pastry is usually white because there's almost always a fresh dusting. In coffee shops, the talk is snow, as it is in bars, in saunas, and in the small town of Mohawk, where a giant wooden dipstick, painted red and white, keeps track, unofficially, of the snow on the roadside. The sign is more wink than masochist, there for tourists and for the people who live in the Keweenaw, a place where so much snow falls yet no one really complains. Except for the neighbors, when shoveled snow is piling in their yard, from yours. Nature, they can handle.