dollarvigilante.com / By Redmond Weissenberger / December 9, 2012
The snows have started coming to Minnesota. I saw the first one of the winter just a few days ago. I am staying in a very nice corner of Minneapolis, nestled between the downtown and a very nice suburb. I’m also on the edge between a couple tony city neighborhoods and where the black people live. A block to the north the ghetto gets a running start and just four blocks later past a wide main road it gallops at top speed. But its nearness keeps prices low where I am and I get the benefits of the nearby monied neighborhoods.
One of those benefits is driving around some very nice winding streets with storybook lower upperclass houses and lots of trees and parks. With the first snow of the winter the entire place took on the look of a holiday commercial, as if god or nature had been working really hard to get the set just right to sell something. On the night of the first snow I drove through the residential streets filled with million-dollar homes on my way to the nice Chinese restaurant — the one which uses high quality ingredients yet whose prices are only slightly higher than you’d find in a takeout shack in the ghetto –
I had a moment.
Couldn’t sleep again.
Looking out the window of my backdoor. The tiny courtyard with my tiny grey Kia Soul in the cinderblock dugout below and the alley behind. The scene was framed by the three conifers??? decked in snow the left, our little black, old-fashioned bench similarly decked below them. The garages and backs of our neighbors houses beyond the alley. The snow caught the meager mix of moonlight and porchlight and multiplied it a hundred times, so that it seemed the light came from below and was lazily swatting upward at the gloom.
