At 7:05 yesterday evening, winter returned with a bang – actually, several bangs. Thundersnow! The wind picked up, and rain turned in less than a minute into driving snow. I had to go up to my parents’ house to make some phone calls; the second one was to a friend who lives along this same ridge about twelve miles to the southwest. He told me the storm had passed right over them, and the wind roared like a tornado. When he and his family emerged from the basement twenty minutes later, an inch and a half of snow were on the ground – “and it has a really strange consistency, dry but still sticky,” he said.
We only got a quarter inch right then, but a couple more inches fell during the night. The wind continues to gust, blowing the snow around almost as if it were January or something. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the thaw is finally over, but the long-range forecasts aren’t good.
I found something I’d written last year and forgotten about, at the end of a post from January 23:
If you’re going out, be careful
where you step. The wind
has been everywhere, erasing
its own tracks. Who knows
what the snow might hide.
I took my camera for a walk in the lee of the ridge, and found some treasures – enough for three posts, at least. Up on the ridgetop, the wind roared and snow was plastered on the west side of the tree trunks. You didn’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind had been blowing.
