It’s cold outside today, as cold in Central Texas for the weather curmudgeon as it is in northern Ohio where he imagines his son might be trudging across campus soon. (Although the weather curmudgeon privately acknowledges that he hasn’t the faintest idea about his son’s schedule.)
The weather curmudgeon stands at the patio door surveying his backyard. Here and there, snow lies on the lawn left over from yesterday. The raised garden bed closest to the fence is still covered in white. So is the pile of logs. And a blanket left outside in a chair.
The weather curmudgeon remembers the morning yesterday and the predicted wintery mix. When the snow started falling and the flakes got bigger and bigger. When they fell from the sky in clusters so big that even the weather curmudgeon was amazed. Some were as big as half-dollars and fell to the ground like leaves. Others were picked up by the wind and swirled around. The sky was thick with them.
And when the weather curmudgeon opened the door on that snowy yesterday, the air was full of a crunching/clicking sound of the snowflake clusters hitting the ground. He stood on the patio and gasped aloud.
“Holy cow, ” he said, shouting to his fair and industrious wife who was across the house getting ready for work. “I’ve never ever seen anything like this, Trudy!”
The accumulation never did amount to the four inches the weather men predicted. But with this exclamation coming from the weather curmudgeon (who grew up in northern Illinois ice skating, building snow forts, having snowball fights and trudging across campus in knee-deep snow for an 8am Dynamics class), we know it really must have been something.