Where snow is rare

Julia ♦ February 4, 2023 ♦ 4 Comments

How rare is a snowball fight in summer?
Jeff and Drew took advantage of the strange weather at Crater Lake in June, 2000.

“I’ve always felt lucky to live someplace where snow is rare, you know? It’s rareness that makes it so special.” ― Stephanie Perkins

Unlike Perkins, I didn’t always feel lucky that snow was rare for me.  As a kid I read books about other kids from all different eras, who lived where the snow piled up in huge drifts and the winds and wolves howled outside and hot chocolate and cookies waited by the hearth.  It sounded heavenly, being able to curl up with a book indoors, knowing nobody would make me go outside to play (in my childhood, it was very common for mothers to order kids to go play outside while they chatted over coffee with neighbors).  I thought living where there was lots and lots of snow must be almost magical.

This passed as a snowfall in Atlanta, but Al and I were still able to make a Snow-Daddy.
A bit rounder, but still recognizable. East Point, Georgia, around 1966.

In adulthood, after four years in Dayton, Ohio, I was pretty well cured of my romantic notions of snow.  I had never realized how much I’d miss seeing the ground if it was covered up with white for weeks on end.  Not to mention driving in it, walking in it, bundling up two babies plus myself every time I ventured out…I too ended up feeling lucky to have lived where snow was rare, but in my case, it was for mostly practical reasons.

During the decades that followed, during which we lived where snow was not only rare, but pretty much nonexistent, I never missed it.  But I must admit now, when I see it starting to fall, I feel a bit of the old excitement I used to feel as a kid.  Maybe not enough to actually wish for a big snowstorm.  Just enough to appreciate how pretty it can be.  The other day I said to Jeff “I guess it might be a bit disappointing to get through an entire winter with no snowfalls.”  He had a ready answer. “I don’t think I’d regret it.”

I first wrote this post just a couple of days before the predictions of the Great Blizzards of 2016 were announced. The rest, as they say, is history.  Up until then, we had a few flurries blowing through the sky, but no snow to speak of.  How quickly things change.

If you live where snow is rare, enjoy it!  And if you live where it’s everywhere, all around, all the time, like election coverage, enjoy it! (The snow, not the election coverage.) Either way, have a bit of February fun.  Find a comfy chair, put your feet up, and read, or doze, or listen to music, or indulge in a video or some other election-free television.  Have a hot cup of tea or coffee, and let us know how the weather is in your neck of the woods.

This post was first published seven years ago today. That year was an election year (and an amazing one at that) but it seems that talk of elections is almost nonstop now, so perhaps the analogy will hold up even in 2023.

The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.