Do true Minnesotans crave snow?

Since our subject today is the lack of snow, I expect this will ensure that we get 3 feet today or tomorrow, rendering everything that follows moot. I will be laughed at in the street: "Hey, there's the moot guy! That was the mootest thing in the paper!" I actually feel mootish in advance.

But maybe it won't happen. Perhaps the storm will skirt the city, leaving naught but a dusting. The sort of irritating snow you have to shovel, because otherwise you look like an antisocial scofflaw. Perhaps we'll get nothing, and the dry, bare world will be with us for a while longer.

That's OK, right? It's possible to be a Minnesotan and not want snow, right?

A lifetime spent on the Plains hasn't made me hate snow, but I'm tired of it on general principle. Oh, I love a good blizzard — the low moans and keening shriek of the wind, the white-out conditions beyond the window, the swarming flakes around the streetlights, the gorgeous sight the next day of a buried world, gleaming and fresh, a foot or two of confectionary sugar topping the backyard patio table like a perfect cake. It's one of those boons of living in a place where every season has its own wardrobe for dressing the world in the style it prefers.

Then I want it all to melt and go away, preferably by noon.

But it doesn't. And that means work. It means scraping the walk, digging out the car, clearing the driveway, pushing out someone who got stuck because the plows didn't come, cursing the plows for not clearing the streets, then cursing the plows because they cleared the streets and shoved a scale model of the Himalayas at the foot of your driveway, then driving to the store through streets that are suddenly as narrow as a 14th-century European town.

It's beautiful, but so is a thunderstorm, and no one wakes the next day with an aching back because you had to shovel 2 feet of standing water.

Cold without snow is a more honest form of winter. More adversarial. More personal. A blank and vacant world of empty lawns and leafless branches scouring a gray low sky is the truth of winter, stripped of its frosting. If there's not much to melt when spring comes, we won't be staring hot daggers at the compacted piles of ice that refuse to dissolve.

Yes, it's satisfying to hack at sidewalk ice with a sharp implement, make a big fissure, pound it some more, crack off some floes and reduce them to rubble. It's revenge. But if a year passes without this interval of vindictive joy, that's ... fine.

But. I feel bad for the people who love snow, require snow and crave snow. They long to stride through a hushed glade on cross-country skis, or rocket down a hill in the streamlined posture of a 1940s hood ornament. It must seem terribly disappointing to have their season of outdoor exertion edited down to the length of a Minnesota spring. Well, maybe next year, as the sports fans say.

If we do get buried soon, there's an upside: We will get a few days when all the Christmas lights are at their best, glowing beneath the pillowy snow. It'll look so nice it'll keep us from having the debate about when it's time to take the lights down. Not yet. Look at that loveliness. Not yet.

Personally, I think it's OK to have the lights on through January. But cut the juice on the first of February. It's the bleak midwinter, and it's best to face facts without the twinkly reminders of a happier time.

You might worry that the eventual return of spring might feel less earned without a winter we all endured. We might feel less like Minnesota, the standard ration of snow, with all its pleasures and complications. They change the flag, and this happened! We've angered the gods!

But a lot of us are fine with that. And we're no less Minnesotan for it.