New to town? Here’s everything you need to know!
My qualifications: I moved here even though I hate winter and crave sunlight. I have successfully not gone fully mad for more than 25 years.
Coping with Duluth winters is a big adjustment if you are from almost anywhere else. People move here thinking, “I like a place with all four seasons,” and then their spirits break on the anvil of winter. There are only two seasons here: winter and summer. Summer is slow to arrive and quick to leave. The part where the city is soggy like a wet diaper for two months is called spring, but it’s just winter and summer overlapping. There will be snow on the ground in April, maybe just in shaded areas but it will be there, if it’s not still actively falling, which it may be. Fall is fine if you like that sort of thing, but really it’s just summer dying, and winter being born. This can be a devastating realization. After a particularly brief, cool summer, when you were really hoping for a long, hot one, the sight of the first red leaf in mid-August feels like a knife in the guts. Here’s what I’ve learned about coping with Duluth weather — mostly winter, but other seasons can suck too. …
