Dispatch from Minneapolis in Midwinter
It feels like the End and the Beginning all at once
During my first winter and then late winter and then early spring in Minneapolis a few years ago, I learned that you could tell time by the character of the snow and ice on the ground.
The early winter snows were fluffy and idyllic; the late winter and early spring snows were slushier and wetter and kind of gross. (I knew this from growing up in Colorado too; Spring snow is more moist in general and my climatology background knows why..however in Colorado snow melts within a few days because of the Chinook winds speeding down the slopes and warming the Front Range up. I digress). In Minnesota, unlike Colorado, it is cold enough such that is it possible for snowpack to be built up and to stay for weeks, months, even.
So by the time March and April come around, and the Melting Time is upon us, grotesque things begin to emerge. Empty chip bags, bubble gum wrappers. A plastic bottle full on urine. Dog poop. Trash. Excrement. Mud. There will just be gross stuff in the snow banks and on the grass, stuff that was previously covered by snow and ice. But when warmth returns, all begins to be revealed.
It is the heart of winter. Literally as I write this, it is Midwinter, halfway between the Solstice and Equinox. In Minnesota, we’ve been dealing with Arctic blasts and polar vortex breakups all month, meaning that it’s been single digits and negative temperatures for a while. Except for today. Our pipes for our bathroom sink have been frozen for about 10 days, and as I write this, I hear a trickle of water coming from the bathroom! I left the faucet on so that when it warmed up enough I would know that the pipes had finally melted. It’s finally 22 degrees, and they’ve melted, announced by the sound of trickling water!
All that to say it’s been a very cold January, made even chillier by ICE and DHS’s Operation Metro surge in Minnesota.
It’s a potent juxtaposition: the ice and the ICE and people who are familiar with ice. ICE has been occupying our state for a month now, and has both wreaked havoc and fear and immense irreparable damage to families and neighborhoods. At the same time, Minnesotans have been resiliently resisting. I went to a vigil in 10 degrees and to a march in zero degrees, and almost got frostbite because at the march in Powderhorn park a few weeks ago, about 100,000 people were reported to attend and the streets were so clogged that most of us waited for hours until the crowd spilled out into Lake Street. That day/week, the streets were particularly icy, as we’ve been having unusual freeze-thaw patterns (that are more reminiscent of March or April rather than January), so folks clipped on their yak tracks and cramp-one, or just walked really really slowly. On other days, two Fridays in a row, around 100,000 people again were marching in Downtown Minneapolis; the high temperatures those days were something like -8 and 10 degrees F, respectively.
There’s a lot that’s been written and said about Operation Metro Surge and life in Minnesota. The thing I want to articulate here in this post is the dialectic, the both-and.
This is both a horrifying and inspiring time. Just a few weeks ago, in late December and early January, I was despondent seeing all the ICE activity because I felt powerless against it and I felt like only a few people were against this. Now, “Abolish ICE’ is the moderate ask. My rich neighbors in a mutual aid signal group are buying groceries for families with their own money—and the requests for help are filled in minutes. Labor groups actually organized a substantial regional strike, even if for only one day. All around the city there are decentralized underground networks of free grocery delivery and giving rides.
The horrors still persist. One of my friends or neighbors could be killed or detained at any moment. I have started carrying around my Global Entry card (though it is not my passport, it does list my citizenship status). Neighbors are being disappeared; children are being detained. Liam Ramos, the five year old with the Spider-Man backpack, was released today, but what about the other children?? We hear stories about people being released out of detention from the Whipple Building in the middle of the night and are released into a nearby park/forest in the 0-degree cold with no outerwear or phone, and are getting severe, limb-threatening frostbite. Friends who live in South Minneapolis tell me about the constant audial onslaught of whistles alerting of ICE presence, and the periodic helicopter sounds, keeping their nervous system on high alert and reminding them of summer 2020 when the National Guard terrorized their neighborhoods.
I’ve been thinking a lot about seasons lately and how one can tell the time by the seasons, and how one can intuit how to be or what to do by the seasons. And all this is true; attuning to the earth is acting in accordance is interwoven with liberation. However, sometimes there are times when time is like a portal and one doesn’t quite know what time it is. Or time takes on a quality when time seems to stand still and ordinary life is suspended. Or time seems to take on a quality where it seems like it is both time for one thing as well as another seemingly opposite thing.
This has been January 2026 in Minnesota. Time has at once been suspended, tearing open this portion of space-time—saying, “this is an extraordinary time and we must stop business as usual” and daily life goes on, people need to be fed, and rent is due today. This quality almost feels like early lockdown days of COVID, when everything was disrupted and everyone shared this experience of disruption.
The other dialectic is the simultaneous horrors and collapse and hope and solidarity. It feels like something is ending; it feels like autumn, with death and decay. It feels like the fall of the empire. It feels like spooky season and a time for really sitting with the grief. It also feels like something is wanting to begin; a new reorientation to our neighbors, a commitment to getting people’s needs met; horizontal, autonomous ways of organizing ourselves to get this done. The hope of spring, the decay of autumn, all in the same moment. While dealing with snow and cold and ice and ICE.
The old way is melting. The empire is collapsing, revealing all the grotesque things that have accumulated in the snow banks. Our toes are cold but our hearts are warm. It is February, and it is 26 degrees, and the ice has started to melt.
that ending!