Ok, Son of the South be damned, snow still holds some sort of magical sway over me. Used to be I’d see it once every 10 years or so in NOLA, and it wasn’t a very overachieving form of snow… small flakes that didn’t softly pile up on the ground, but instead elbowed the flakes below them into “almost sleet”.
Last year in Austin I was witness to a proper snow. Big fluffy puffballs of pocket lint, gracefully and slowly poking Galileo in the eye by bringing air friction into the mix and gently moseying down to the ground to gather into downy piles.
Tonight I had the strange fortune of driving through that same sort of snow. The temperature today started at a high of 79 degrees, and plummeted to 32 in a matter of six hours, bringing rain with it. The rain, ever the ambitious one, moved on to become pea sized hail, then promptly lost its motivation and became rain again. After picking Sweets up from school the hail started again, then rapidly became little soft blurs in my headlights that I realized was snow. Big, proper fluffy snow again. And I was driving it it. Trying desperately to pay attention to the road because all I wanted to do was focus on the snow as it blew through the arcs of the streetlights.
Ok, so snow is no big deal… to anyone who lives outside of this temperate region of the South. We have three and a half seasons down here, and none of them include the need for chains on tires (unless you want that extra traction for offroading). And a snow shovel is used to pick up after the horses in the parades.
It was fun and novel, and I get to feel like a kid again making mud angels (I didn’t say it accumulated much on the ground, now did I… you just get to enjoy it floating through the air).
I leave you with a picture of our mailbox.
it snowed here today