Back in Bakersfield we would occasionally get a storm that would drop snow almost down to the valley. I used to drive out to a parking lot on our side of town that had a panoramic view of the mountains to the East, South and West of us. It was the most beautiful thing I remember seeing in Bakersfield.
This morning I am looking out my kitchen window at birds knocking snow powder off our rail, snow covered trees with tops shining orange in the morning sunlight against the clear blue sky. This is substantially more impressive than the snowy mountain panorama of my youth.
This is a beautiful morning.
Recently we've been getting storms where the wind is so strong that it rips the branches off nearby trees and drops them onto my car! I'm hoping for those types of beautiful snowy times you describe. Glad today was a beautiful morning, Bill.
The reversal of childhood and adulthood. I grew up loving mornings in Ohio when we would awaken to snow on the trees, wires, cars, everything. There was a blinding beauty in the dawn light. There was also a glimmer of hope that school might be cancelled. Then it was a whole day of making snow angels in the powder, or if it was moister, "packing snow", snowmen, snow forts, and, of course, snowballs. I WAS the kid from "The Christmas Story" with the arms-straight-out snowsuit. When we came in for lunch we would be completely snow-blind and mom would have hot chocolate steaming and ready.
I found that as I reached later adolescence, the snow mornings weren't quite as pretty. They meant back-breaking effort shovelling our driveway and walks. The "packing snow" that we loved as kids was now heavy, wet snow that was twice as hard to shovel. The helpful snow plows would pile up a four foot barrier of it at the base of our driveway. If the weather turned colder, it would freeze into snow cement that couldn't even be moved with a snow shovel. We had to resort to an old steel coal shovel to break it up into viable chunks.
I now find the clear mornings with snow in the Sierras and Coastal Range really beautiful. If I really get the urge to commune with the powder, I declare a snow morning, hop in my Jeep, drive 45 minutes up Breckenridge Mountain, and throw snowballs at absolutely nothing in particular. (It never returns fire.) Then I make the most beatutiful drive imaginable; the drive HOME FROM the snow.
