I wonder how many characters the blog titles will take? Anyone care to take wagers? I’ve got two more blog entries to guest write, we can make it an experiment!
But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. Check out the weather –
Snow. Now we don’t live in Minnesota or the Dekotas or even upstate New York (where snow is bread for the rest of the country) but I think we get our fair share of weather here in the Great Lake State. Add to that the fact that my family hails from Minnesota, Upstate New York and Wisconsin and TheMan grew up in the U.P. so I think we can safely include ourselves with “people who know snow”. One thing you learn when you live with snow is the snow walk.
You know, I was trying to analyze the snow walk all the way to TheMan’s work on Friday and I just can not figure out how to explain it. We just do it and TheMan is much better at it than I am but I’ll give it a go. The first thing you have to remember is that you never commit everything to one step. That summer walk where you are all care free swinging your feet out there grabbing up the pavement? Is going to send you hinder over tea kettle. Instead the winter walk is a shorter more controlled walk. The foot is placed flatly and not so far out from your body that you can’t recover if it decides to take a small sight seeing cruise.
TheMan tells me that the forward propulsion is all from the hips and the feet are just there to…ahhh…well so that you aren’t walking on your ankles. I, on the other hand do give my feets a little oomph but I think I take much shorter steps than he does. He also walks a lot faster than I do on the slickery but I’ve been a Troll most of my life and he’s a Yooper. Eh.
You also don’t usually think this much about walking the snow walk when it gets weathery, you just step out and head on your way. I’ll keep giving it some thinks as I walk around but I want to let you people who grew up below the snow belt know that it’s a learned thing. You’ll get it eventually. Have hope.
