Lessons from a Fargo Winter

Even now, certain Fargo winter moments return to me unexpectedly: two squirrels carrying nuts beneath a tree, a MATBUS I could see but could not wait for and a locked apartment door on a bitterly cold night. At the time, these moments seemed unrelated. Looking back, I see the same lesson running through them. Life gives us no certainty, yet it still asks us to prepare. A squirrel cannot know whether it will live to see the winter it prepares for. I could not know what two more minutes in the wind, or one forgotten key, might mean for me. But Fargo taught me that what looks small before trouble arrives—a nut, a coat, a phone, a key—may suddenly become very important.

One November day in 2022, a small pile of nuts beneath a tree outside my apartment caught my attention. From my balcony, I kept wondering how they had come to be there. Perhaps someone had been carrying a packet of nuts and the packet had torn open, resulting in the person leaving them there. But the idea did not make much sense. While I was still wondering, a squirrel appeared. It picked up one nut and ran away. Soon it returned for another, and then a second squirrel joined it. The two moved back and forth, each carrying one nut at a time. I watched them for much of the day. One nut, one trip, then another nut and another trip. Gradually the pile became smaller. Only later did I understand that I had been watching part of their preparation for winter. The scene reminded me of a Bengali poem from my childhood in which an ant searches for food to store for winter. Back then, winter was mostly an idea to me. Now, decades later in Fargo, that old lesson was taking shape beneath my own window.

The very next morning, however, I saw something that unsettled that simple lesson. Early that morning, I noticed a squirrel lying dead on the street. A vehicle had run over it. I cannot know with certainty that it was one of the two squirrels I had watched the day before, but I could not shake the feeling that it was. Only hours earlier I had watched a small creature preparing for a winter that had not yet arrived. Now it lay motionless on the road. For several days, the body remained there. Slowly, weather, traffic and time changed it. Bit by bit it disappeared. I found this unexpectedly painful because I had seen the effort that came before its death. The squirrel had worked as though tomorrow mattered, yet all its preparation could not protect it from a vehicle the following morning. The childhood lesson of the ant suddenly seemed less simple. Preparation matters, but preparation is not a promise. We can prepare for winter and never reach winter.

A few months later, probably in January 2023, I began to understand the other side of the lesson. It was my first Fargo winter, and I was still learning what cold here meant. One day at a MATBUS stop, I could see the bus coming, but it had another stop before reaching me. I probably needed to wait only two more minutes.

But standing in the Fargo wind, two minutes no longer felt like two minutes. Every second became something I had to endure. The cold seemed to cut through my clothes. I could see the bus coming, but my body was already telling me to get out of the wind. There was a Dollar Tree nearby. I hurried inside. From the warmth of the store, I watched the bus arrive, stop briefly and then leave. Letting that bus go was one of the wiser decisions I made that winter. It was so close, yet for me, in that moment, impossibly far.

Inside the store, I did not care much about the missed bus; I was simply grateful to be away from the wind. Until then, cold had still been partly a number to me, something shown on a weather app. That day I learned that two minutes outside could be entirely different from two minutes inside. A store I might normally enter to buy something had suddenly become a shelter. Only then did I understand what those squirrels had been doing months earlier. They had known in November what I was learning with my own body in January: by the time the need becomes urgent, preparation may already be late.

Then came another winter night that made the lesson frighteningly personal. It was around 11 p.m., snowy, windy and perhaps negative 15 degrees Celsius. I remembered that I needed to take a garbage bag to the dumpster. It seemed like nothing. I would step out, drop the bag and immediately return. Because I expected to be outside for barely a minute, I did not put on a proper winter jacket or take my phone. The other person in the apartment was asleep and did not know that I had gone outside. I threw the bag into the dumpster, turned back and reached the entrance. Then I realized that I did not have my key.

For a moment, I could hardly process the situation. The warm apartment was only a door away, but I could not enter it. My phone was inside. The person inside was asleep. Nobody was outside. Our building had no enclosed entrance where I could at least escape the wind while waiting. I stood there without a jacket, without a phone and without a key, with no nearby shelter I could think of. What had been a one-minute trip had suddenly become dangerous. I do not know how long I stood there, at a loss about what to do. I remember thinking that this might be the end of my life.

Then I saw a car pull into the parking lot. A man who lived in the same building got out and walked toward the entrance. I cannot describe the relief I felt when I saw him. He opened the door, and I got inside. At that moment, he seemed almost like an angel arriving out of nowhere. He probably thought he was simply returning home on an ordinary winter night. He had no idea that, for me, opening that door felt like being given my life back.

I still think about those squirrels when winter begins to settle over Fargo. They remind me that preparation does not give us control over what comes next, but it can change how we meet it. The same is true of a coat, a phone, a key or the decision to step out of the wind and let a bus go. These may seem like small things until the moment they are not. Fargo winter taught me to pay attention to those small things, because sometimes preparation begins long before we realize how much we will need it.