A Correction For MPR This Morning

 It was cold this morning. Not super -cold, like frost warnings all over, but after a pretty warm summer, still a real chill. It prompted a news segment of records for cold temperatures in the state, for earliest snowfalls, both flurries and measurable amounts. The concluding comment was that July is the only month here with no snowfalls.

That's not true. I saw one.

When we were quite young, my parents owned a resort on Second Crow Wing lake, called Pleasant Ridge. We moved away when I was in third grade, so 1957 if my math still is correct. I wasn't there the year I was in kindergarten, since Mom was too sick that year and I went to stay with relatives on my Dad's side of the family. What happened was sometime in the years when I was in first through third grade.

My parents were very work-oriented people, passing those values on to us kids. Work didn't stop until it was done, or something very important happened. So any time they called us kids from what we'd been doing when they stopped what they were doing just to show us something, it left memories. There was the huge pine snake on the property, or the huge fall monarch butterfly migration heading southward across the lake. And there was the time it snowed in July.

It was a short flurry, not the kind of big thing, obviously, that made history, or even was noted over a large part of the state. We couldn't even go sledding on it because it disappeared as it landed. But summer was the time my parents made any money from the resort. People came to fish, and swim, and canoe, and even take trips to places like Itaska State Park, the headwaters of the Mississippi. But mostly fishing, of course. Warm sunny weather was not just expected, it was vital. Money was very tight, and eventually drove the sale of the resort as a financial necessity.

So it wasn't just come-out-and-see-this-snow, it was all the complaints and fears that accompanied this rare event. It was pretty cool to watch, but even better that it stopped quickly. It was rarely referred to in later years, more of an oddity than a potential disaster. Eventually other things took our attention.

But every once in a rare while, the memory returned. Especially when others say it never happened. We saw it. It snowed once in July in Minnesota, around 70 years ago.