I was recently looking at old photos of my kids, photos from back when they wore footy pajamas and built forts out of couch cushions and pulled all the water bottles out of the cabinet just for laughs.

There was so much snow in so many of the pictures! Winter after winter, month after month of toddlers in snow pants and preschoolers being pulled to school in the sled and Kindergarteners trying to help shovel after a big snowfall. There were pictures of cats sitting on the back porch and glaring at the snow in early April. Snowmen built in March. Snow forts in February and sledding in January.

We have an accidental tradition in our household. One night per winter when it’s dark and snowing hard, we put on all our snow gear and we walk to the nearby playground and we play in the new snow while everything glows around us. It’s magical.

I should say we had an accidental tradition. There hasn’t been a great evening snowfall like that in two winters now. We hardly had any snow at all last winter, and just a little this winter.

I’ve been very morose about it all since looking at these pictures. Especially when I think of my kids looking at these same photographs twenty years from now and exclaiming over the amount of snow we used to get. It was glorious, wasn’t it?

I try to soothe myself by remembering that climate is change. Climate has always been change. Nature is change. The land on which my house sits was underwater 450 million years ago, and 2 million years ago it was covered by a glacier. We had locusts destroying all the crops in this state less than 200 years ago. And some years have always been colder or wetter than other years. I try to remind myself about the winter of 2022-2023 when we got massive amounts of snow and it was deadly cold. The boiler at our cabin failed and a bunch of pipes burst and even the toilet bowl cracked open.

See, that was just two years ago!

Someone who is not a meteorologist but who spends his winters plowing snow in the Cascade Mountains was telling me that the old-timers always say that weather is on approximately a hundred-year cycle. That intense, glorious winter of 2022-2023 was the end of the hundred-year cycle, and now we reset and build back up to that.

I hope he’s right. Even if it means I won’t get another winter like that in my lifetime. And my kids won’t either, but I like to picture Minnesota mothers a hundred years from now pulling their children to school on sleds and wrangling dripping, dirty mittens in the entryway every afternoon straight through April.