Abandoned Port a Potty and Fenceposts in the Snow

This picture about sums up the North Dakota experience. For some reason, even though I spent 17 years amongst the snow-bound eskimoes, the complete whiteness of the countryside on the way into town struck me as so interesting the other day. Many winters would go by where by the end of it, you couldn't even see the fence posts along the road. And believe me, the fence posts are usually the only things left to break up all the white.

Can you see the port-a-potty almost buried in the snow? I was just driving by and I actually backed up to take this picture on my cell phone. I don't know what the heck a port-a-potty is doing in the middle of nowhere, but it struck me as absolutely hilarious.

But you know what I've always found interesting about North Dakotans, especially in light of my years in the South? Well, in Memphis, if the temperature hits 50 degrees in the winter, you'll see people walking down the street in their parka, mittens, and big fluffy scarfs. Yet on Sunday, when it was maybe upwards of 1 degree above zero, at church I saw a lady in flipflops. FLIPFLOPS! And then at Wal-Mart I saw a kid, maybe 10-years-old, in capri pants and shoes with no socks. I don't know what kind of mother would let their kid go out in subzero temperatures in capri pants and no socks.

The other interesting thing about North Dakota is the fact that you can get all my North Dakota-native, Norwegian-ancestried relatives in a room together in the middle of winter, and all you'll hear is complaint after complaint after complaint about how it's so cold and there's so much snow. This, coming from people who have lived in North Dakota THEIR ENTIRE LIVES. When you get my aunts, my parents, my grandparents, my cousins, they have all lived in North Dakota probably a million and two years accumulatively, yet they all still complain about the weather.

But I'm sure they still live in North Dakota despite all the winter complaining because in the summer when it's 95 above, while I'm off basking in the sun at the lake, all you hear is complaint after complaint after complaint about how it's so hot and it's so humid and it's so hot that they all just want to take their clothes off. Okay, that was not a pleasant picture. A bunch of Norwegians in a room together without their clothes - not good. I'll leave it at that.




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