Let It Snow!

A few seconds of watching the first flakes of the season,
1 December 2007. Eventually, four or five inches led to our first
city snow emergency (ie, plowing, ticketing and towing).

How very strange to have snow so early! I suppose we usually have some around Thanksgiving, but it seems that snow that sticks before January is a thing of one's childhood, not something one encounters any longer.

It's a trick of memory. Yes, the world is warming. (It is. Knock it off.) But a heavy snow when you're seven is apt to make you remember copious amounts of snow blanketing your neighborhood across many years.

I thought about this recently when seeing photographs of the Muse in Arkansas as a child and teenager. And while all the winter shots next to pines with snow-sagging limbs and houses blanketed like Swiss ski lodges may have been captured in just two of 18 winters, looking at the volume of photos snapped in those years makes it seem unusual when she says, "We almost never had snow."

Would I have recognized winter without it? No. Not a bit.

So it was wonderful to see the snow falling so thickly over the past few days. It piled up December 1 and again yesterday, as evidenced by this photo snapped at 4:30 pm, Tuesday:


But today it is sunny, and that too will be welcomed. The abrupt grey and white matte skies have been difficult to adjust to. You can see how lights in all the apartments are coming on either very early or later than expected now, all of us having trouble sleeping and waking, never truly getting into either.

So thank you for the early snow, dear winter. But now let us have a bit of sun, please. My jade plant is looking awful lean.
-cK