Tonight's forecast calls for the first snow of the season, starting off at around 4:00am. Everyone around here is pretty excited. Reason being, around these parts we live at about 2 feet below sea level. This will not only be the first snow of the season, but the first snow of the last several seasons... The last one I remember being during a spring time tea party at a friend's house when I was quite young. The pattern seems to be snow every 10 years or so... I'm sure there is some scientific reasoning to that, but my only meteorology experience being that which I've inherited from farming family, I'm not going to try and guess.
That said, snow has a rather bizarre way of finding me. Of greatest interest would be my freshman or sophomore year of college. I was sitting at the San Diego airport, waiting to go home for a break. I looked out the window, and... Snow?!? Everyone was baffled. And of course, none of my friends believed me. 72 degrees and partly cloudy with snow flurries? Yeah right.
So tomorrow should be interesting. None of the snow will stick of course, but ice scraping time should be accounted for. And I hope we're stocked up on chocolate powder at the coffee house, because except for the few oddballs that always order Frappes (it's freezing outside. What are you thinking??) everyone is going to be searching for that taste of winter (which if you were wondering, has a 75% chance of being a white mocha. Always). They'll be scrounging up dreams of a white Christmas from their childhoods, busting out the holiday music and saying "hey, how about this weather?" to every passerby they meet. Luckily, the Kansas part of me, besides being adept at meteorological predictions, has also been gifted with the ability to talk about the weather for hours on end. [By the way, never move to the Midwest unless you find conversations about the weather extremely stimulating and you yourself are capable of discussing every minute detail at length, and its potential repercussions for the next six to eight months.]
As for me, I've already got the Rat Pack Christmas album in my cd player and rock out to Mannheim Steamroller on the local classic rock turned seasonal cheer radio station. I'm still a little baffled as to why Christmas light are up all over town, and confused about how tomorrow is already December 7th, and still full of my fair share of bah-humbugs, but maybe a dose of 3" of freshly-fallen-quickly-melted snow is just what I need for that final shove into the holiday spirit. And besides, its a good excuse to sport my new and wonderfully tacky fleece jacket, right?
