In the past six months or so, I’ve experienced everything from 110 to -40 degrees Fahrenheit (‘real feel’ temperatures, anyway.) A one hundred and fifty degree temperature span. Here in the ice and snow and heavily salted roads of Minnesota (my poor Subaru), that desert lives within me still. Today was the first day in over two weeks that St. Paul has woken up to temperatures (just) above zero, but I can’t quite get the desert out; sunburned open highways roll through my veins, and I can see the hills turn to mountains. I can hear those stories on the road, and I can feel the hot windshield pressed against my bare toes. It’s all been baked inside. I am alive with it. I am a hundred and fifty degrees of world.

I’m not sure if any of those sentences make sense, but do you know what I mean anyway? Do you ever wake up on an icy blue morning and feel a sun-hot, take-your-breath-away, rolling wind of nostalgia?