I'm back from the future and can report on 2017. This isn't a full accounting, but it'll give you an idea of what's ahead. Don't worry! Everything goes OK, except for that thing I can't talk about.
January: Get ready for that winter thaw we all look forward to — temps should be 83 by noon! Unfortunately, they'll be 43 million degrees by 12:01, since our models show the sun going nova. Expect a rough evening commute.
February: The Mall of America announces that the space vacated by the movie theaters will be filled by a 37,000-square-foot Apple store that sells one cable.
March: A brutal, uncompromising series of winter storms shut down I-94 from St. Cloud to Fergus Falls. "We can't find it," MnDOT says of the freeway. "We know it's somewhere under the snow, but we sent out the plows, and they ended up going through fields, running into barns."
April: A gentle, understanding series of late-winter storms bear down on the state, then veer off when they see that the tulips are out. Bluebirds appear; the trees bud; the ice is out of the lakes before the taxes are due. Minnesotans find themselves behaving uncharacteristically, singing in public and hugging people they just met on the elevator. This, we say to ourselves, is why we live here.
May: By the end of the month, the state has finished digging out from the Great Storm of April 30th.
June: Wet conditions mean a late start to the farming season. "It's as bad as I've seen it," says Pete Johnson, who's been farming since 1974 and giving interviews about how bad it is since 1975. "This is like '87, when I had to switch from flax to shrimp."
July: The Twins have a winning record. "I think what we have to do is keep striking the ball with a long, tapered wooden stick," says manager Kent Hrbek, "and having more of our guys run all around the bases than the other guys. If we can do that, our inevitable collapse next month will be all the more heartbreaking."
