This message is for the snow, which has fallen so steadily and so heavily on Minot and its surrounding areas over the past two and a half months.
You have overstayed your welcome.
Take your tiny, white, crystalline body and go back to the sky from which you came. You've had your fun, over 50 inches of it since showing your seemingly innocent, fluffy face back in early November.
I can still remember it now.
It was Nov. 7, just three days after the election of Barack Obama as the 44th U.S. president. More than half a foot of you fell that day, blanketing the streets, yards, cars and rooftops of Minot.
At that time you were a novelty, a shiny white symbol of the new season to come. I immediately thought of Christmas lights, presents, turkey and the good times I'd soon be having with my family.
This image lasted through November and into December, despite your insistence on sticking around.
When the threat of a blizzard turned into an actual blizzard in mid December, my friends and I had a party in your honor, all of us hunkering inside, drinking and playing board games with the heat cranked up to 76 degrees.
From there I continued to keep a positive attitude, choosing to look upon you in a favorable light despite the fact that you were causing roofs to leak, schools to be canceled and sporting events to be postponed.
I dug out paths in you in the back yard for my three dogs to run in and do their business in. And as you kept falling, I turned the paths into a maze and delighted in watching the dogs find their way from end to end.
I'd email pictures of the dogs waist-high in you to my parents in Indiana, both of whom never tired in hearing about the amount of you we were receiving. My father told me he'd watch the weather channel, waiting for the next wave of you to hit North Dakota. Then he'd send me text messages on the day of the storm, asking me how much of you had fallen and if I was ready to move to a warmer climate.
I'd respond with an exaggerated snowfall count and tell him how I was managing it and that it wasn't all that bad. I told him I enjoyed you.
However, my attitude changed soon after the calendar flipped to 2009.
The honeymoon was over.
No longer were you a source of seasonal fun, you had now become a daily set of questions whose answers would govern the very structure of my day.
Is the alley clean enough to drive the Camry through, or will I have to drive my fiancee to work in the four-wheel-drive Explorer?
Is the sporting event I am scheduled to cover tonight canceled?
And just how much narrower can 16th Street get before it is passable only by cross country skiers?
Don't you see what you are doing to us, snow?
You've got peoples' backs aching from shoveling all day. You've got dogs trying to walk on three feet. You've got cars sliding into each other. You've even got people risking bodily harm shoveling snow off their roofs.
Knowing all this, you still choose to stick around - and I know why.
You're cold.
And I'm hoping for a heat wave.
(Craig Haupert is a sports writer for The Minot Daily News. He can be reached by e-mail at chaupert@minotdailynews.com).