Cold Snap

It's lovely outside. Clear and cold. Frost adorns the lawns and draws little outlines on the leaves.

There was still ice on my windshield when I got to work. And I was late: this was after nine. The sun had been up a couple hours. As I drove, the sunlight hit the icy windshield and shattered into a hundred bright colors.

Ice is exciting and beautiful. This is why: We don't really get a lot of it around here.

I live a hundred miles in from the Pacific. It's a lot colder here in winter than at the coast, and a lot warmer in summer. The weather's a little less temperate, and winter weather takes on one of two forms: Clear and cold, or cloudy and not so cold. The clouds trap just enough heat to keep us above freezing. Thus it almost never snows. When the clouds go away, as they have for the past few days, the heat escapes to space and we get below freezing at night. But there's no precipitation and again, no snow.

We crunched in snow a few weeks ago, getting our tree. But that was up the hill a bit. Down here: none yet. Likely won't be any. The dog's plastic little swimming pool was frozen over this morning, and the cat was all puffed up and angry looking, and the chickens huddled in the rising sun. But no snow. Just frost: everything white and brown and green.

People who live where ice is a hazard and a bother: sorry. Round here, it's kind of a treat.