When I woke up, I was surprised to see snow! I had missed reading the updated weather reports so I wasn’t aware of the big storm coming today.
Now the first snow of the season – on the last day of the year – was fun snow. Lots of kids were out making sculptures, shrieking and throwing snow balls. It melted the next day. Since it came on New Year’s Eve and wasn’t too thick, it was a nice toy, maybe a late Christmas gift Santa had forgotten.
But this snow is Serious Snow. Not as severe as an East Coast storm I know. I remember – a little! Here though in Seattle it doesn’t take much to shut down the place. And that’s exactly what happened. Nearly all schools in Western Washington were closed today. Schools here on the island will be closed tomorrow too. Police in Seattle were closing roads. Highways covered with ice. Businesses shut down too. Even some government offices.
It was thick enough to be sled snow – lots of sleds came out in the neighborhood and we heard lots of shrieks from the hill behind our home. It was shovel snow – I spent some time this afternoon and tried to clear our driveway and walkways (using the only snow shovel we had kept from RI, a small portable one!). It was wet sock snow – the snow was so high that it fell down into the girls boots when they tried to walk through it!
The snow last week came at night and was beginning to melt by morning.
But this snowfall started in the morning and continued until the afternoon.
When I first woke up, what I noticed most was how beautiful the trees were. They had only a light coating of snow, and I especially appreciated the pattern of the pine branches. To me, covered in snow, they resembled pieces of snowflakes, the way they are sometimes drawn and illustrated. Later on the branches would bend with the weight of the snow, becoming buried in thick white, as if a child had tried to frost them with too much icing. But in the beginning of the storm, I liked the pines:
To help illustrate the depth of the snowfall, here are a couple pictures that were taken early this afternoon…:
The view from our back deck – note the railings
Here is a plate, a large ceramic platter made by a friend, that I had placed in my garden as an ornament, orienting it vertically into the soil. By the early afternoon, only the top of the platter, green with a Chinese dragon design, could be seen in the snow drifts…..
