We had our annual dose of designer snow a couple of days ago, and it all looked very pretty, like a Christmas postcard.
I sat in my creative work area and watched big fat flakes drifting down for a while... grateful to not be out in it. But pretty to look at!
We call it "designer snow" because it tends to fall in a day and the following day the temperature has warmed up enough that it melts and so we get to enjoy the pretty scenery for a little bit, take some pictures but we don't really get to be majorly inconvenienced by the snow for any substantial period of time.
In the almost 20 years we have lived in western Washington, I'd say the longest we've had snow on the ground might be two weeks. But I digress...
Like most kids growing up in Denmark we were always hoping to get a snow day, but it was actually remarkably rare. At least it was rare for school to be canceled.
Denmark is further north than most people think, being closer to the latitude of a place like Juneau Alaska than anything else. However, due to the proximity of the Gulf Stream the Danish winter weather tends to be remarkably temperate for as far north as the country lies.
That said, every now and then we'd see the prevailing wind turn and start to blow from the east, straight off the Russian plains and it gets really cold and it can get quite snowy sometimes. And that was what we were always hoping for as kids.
Having lived most of my late teens in the south of Spain followed by more than 20 years in Texas and now another almost 20 years in the Pacific Northwest, I sometimes find it hard to visualize the fact that after a good snowstorm the snowdrifts would actually flow in a continuous line from the corner of the roof and into our driveway.
Of course that didn't happen very often — maybe once every two or three years — but it was enough to make a huge mess, really piss off my dad, and generally would stay on the ground for about a month whenever that happened.
I remember it happened on the King's birthday one year (March 11th) and it felt like such a letdown that it was on a day when we already had off from school!
Of course as a 5-10 year old I wasn't troubled too much by it because I wasn't the one who had to go out and drive around in it!
We very rarely got let off school on account of snow; more often than not, when we did get a day off it had more to do with cold than with sheer volumes of snow. The problem being that a lot of the kids arrived at school by riding the train and at a certain temperature the switch points on the train tracks would freeze up and train service would either be cancelled or delayed and then school would be cancelled!
For me, that meant an opportunity to stay at home and either read books or work on my stamp collection. Yes, I was a pretty boring kid!
I didn't much like school as a kid; it was not something I ever looked forward to... unlike some of my friends who seemed very content with going to school. It probably had a lot to do with the fact that I wasn't a very social kid, so any excuse to not have to go was a good one.
All these years later, our two inches of designer snow serve as an excuse to not go to the post office! Some things never change...
Thanks for stopping by, and have a wonderful Friday!
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Created at 2025.02.07 01:27 PST
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Oh designer snow
This is a very pretty scene