We’ve lived here for exactly a year now, and are both astounded by how much we like it. I hadn’t expected to so much, because I just couldn’t imagine that there would be much magic in the Upper Midwest, especially not in an old milling city built along a river in the plains. I was wrong.

I love that this place has four hardcore seasons, even if one of them is six months long. The only one I don’t like is spring, which is fickle and evil and muddy. It’s sunny one day and blizzarding the next, and the leaves don’t dare peak out until early May. Winter is gorgeous, even (or especially) the below-zero days. Fall is a wonder. And summers are green and gentle in comparison to what we’re used to — easy when one of you is from the swamps and the other from the desert. The Minnesotans use their parks and public spaces, something I’ve not seen so much of somewhere else. During the parts of the year when you can go out, you make sure to do so as much as possible.

Both of the Twin Cities have their charms, but I find that I prefer St. Paul over Minneapolis. It seems older somehow, which isn’t the case, and there’s a charm to the way the canyons of downtown bump up against the ornate cathedral and capitol buildings. There’s all the strangeness of Snelling, which runs all the way across the city, all the way from the Charles M. Schultz Skating Arena until it bumps into the freeway down past my house. There’s the abject trendiness of Grand and Lyndale. There’s the Farmer’s Market on the weekend and the Como Pavilion all the time. Enough used bookstores to keep us both in trouble. The Walker and the Art Institute.

And there’s the wonderful, ever-so-slightly psychotic strangeness of Minnesota malls. We always assumed that malls were invented in SouthCal, but it turns out the first ones were built here — probably to give people a place to go in the winters. There are shopping malls everywhere, from the monstrous Mall of America down to the tiny strip malls. Anywhere else those would just be a strip of shops along the outside of a building, but around here they have an interior strip of more shops. One down past Arden Hills has the creepiest depictions of a town and people on the walls. Badly drawn boys. It looks like the sort of place where the ending of a tense Robin Williams film would be shown, if One Hour Photo was set in a strip mall in Minnesota.

I’m somewhat surprised to find that I like being in an R1 department. I wasn’t sure I would, but it’s a functional, supportive group. I’m getting a lot done, and I’m as happy as I’ve ever been in a job, if not more so.

There’s a lot more that I’m not remembering now. The people, with their combination of niceness and gruffness. The food, which is frustratingly bland and sometimes wonderful. (The best rule to follow, as far as I can tell, is to just not eat the usual white-people food. Stick with ethnic, which includes Swedish and Norwegian and Russian and German.) The music everywhere. The comfort of being a liberal finally living in a blue state. The health care.

The whole lot of it.