I remember when my daughter first went to visit Maine with her new husband. It was summer and Maine was beautiful, and she opined that they could live there. And her husband said, no, because of winter. And this last week, I was in South Dakota, marveling at the scenery and the weather while noticing the highway signs on the interstates that said, road ahead closed when flashing, and I knew it was about winter and snow, and I knew the friends would be heading to Florida in January to escape that winter.

But it got me thinking about seasonal extremes and how the enduring of one might well enhance the appreciation of the other, and how not having that comparison might well lead to a complacency and an expectation that life was always roses and soft breezes. Although mostly it made me appreciate the mindset of those early pioneers and later settlers who decided we can make something of this and discovered ice fishing, hunting, hockey, and skiing as ways to make something of the deep winters while they waited for the beauty of the spring and summers they knew would come.

All in all, it’s a testament to the human spirit. Because even those who couldn’t or wouldn’t stay can’t be faulted for leaving because if there’s anything we’ve learned as humans, it’s that we have the ability to manage our condition to make our lives better. We can leave a lousy job, a bad relationship, a noisy home, a dangerous country. We have choices. Although those choices can open up another can of worms entirely but that’s a story for another day. For now, I’m only thinking about the settlers of the great plains and what they made of their lives in those early days.