The Long, Long, Long, Long, Long, Long Winter

When you live up here where, if you listen to Garrison Keillor, there's 9 months of winter and 3 months of mud (or something hokey like that), you learn to how to spell fun "i-c-e-y a-s-s c-o-l-d". Now the NPR juggernaut, G-Man, weather-wise, is full of poop and quite honestly it's damn nice here April to Most of October.

All that said, when it's cold and sucky here, it can't get much colder and suckier. You may think where you are is cold and sucky but, ha, no. No, it's not. The absolute brutality of the winter here makes the human brain do crazy things. If the brain is already artistically inclined and, by default, close to the edge of insanity, the cold distorts the creative process like a frosty funhouse mirror. So, thanks be to el frio, we get The Art Shanties. A few years ago, a friend of friend, actually, got a bunch of people together, drove out to some random lake and threw up a little village of wacky ice houses. In the great tradition of fun art projects, they've gone from weekend art frolic to fully functional non-profit. They've kept the fun in, though, so that's good.

To tell the truth, Katie and I are bad winter parents. Down in my basement, there's Super 8 footage of my mom pulling me in a sled across the frozen North Dakota tundra, breath pluming from her mouth, me bundled beyond recognition. I fall out of the sled, face-first, into the snow and the camera shakes as my dad, filming, laughs. My mom laughs, too! Before the Art Shanties, all Max and Miles knew about winter was that the trip to the garage became like a mad dash dive into the atmosphere of a cold, angry planet. We'd stand at the back door, dramatically count to three and throw open the door, screaming, "Deploy! Deploy! Deploy!"

Now, thanks to coo-coo ice houses, we know that Miles likes to do his scooty thing on ice; that Max likes to sit in a little, game-themed ice house, built like a die (six-sided, not twenty) and very, very seriously and methodically take all the cubes out of a Boggle tray and then, just as seriously and intently, return the cubes to the tray; and, even in the cold ass cold, these kids are stoopid cute.