LET IT SNOW.

Winter has arrived in the northwest. While it is often cool here in the winter, there is rarely much snow. It’s going to be different this year.

When I awoke yesterday I looked out the window about 7:00 a.m. It looked like frost on the sidewalks. About two hours later I left to join the coffee group in the other building. To my surprise, it was snowing. There were beautiful, light and very tiny snow-lakes accumulating on the ground. And it was cold. The cold reminded me of my college days in the prairies of Canada when we dumb students ran between the dorm and administration without coats. It was chilly, but we were tough.

As we sat around a table yakking it up about the snow and how pretty if was becoming. It was really beginning to sick. It’s early for snow in this area. The ski resorts are happy, but we are at sea level. We should be seeing this in the mountains above out heads. The snow would pick and slow down, but it never stopped. The wind began to pick up and at one time it reminded me of Canadian snow. It was rushing past the windows horizontally. It reminded me of some Canadian snowstorms I in which I had been caught.

By the 5:00 news the TV stations are reporting heavy ice, crashes, sliding and horrible conditions. The tenants from the Midwest and northern states began the normal belittling of drivers from the west and south letting everyone know these people don’t know how to drive in weather like this. Frankly it was getting so bad few seemed to know how to drive. The roads and sidewalks were all ice. There were traffic jams and stranded motorist everywhere.

My daughter gets to work in about 30 minutes. It took here nearly 3 hours to get home. This was the story everywhere. Out power went out and a small party gathered outside my door. There are emergency lights in the hall. Most of us ignored the “no candles” rule just so we could see. Using my cell I reached my family to see how they were doing. They had also lost power. Ours came back on about 30 minutes later. It is now Wednesday night and there is still no power in their area. We learned that 200 transformers were out in our county and at noon only 30 were back on. They came in to my place to get warm and have supper, but nothing I did could convince them to stay. They went back home to sleep. They like a cold room. Good, temperatures remain in the teens. Personally, I like heat.

They are projecting this weather to last through Thursday — thanksgiving. I expect the traffic to be unforgiving. We will leave for the other grandparents house and pray the heat stays on there. If I were going to freeze, I would rather do it at home.