So the students finished around 5 and I had already decided I needed to get home before it was too dark. I often walk home in the dark, but not in these conditions in the dark. As we walked outside, the first thing I noticed was that all of our footprints that we had made in the snow coming into the building at 4:00 were all filled in with
snow. That's a lot of snow coming down in just an hour. There was even more snow coming down. The television analogy to "snow" was even more true now. And yet it was still gorgeous.
The wind picked up for the first time. It had been perfectly still all day. The wind was coming from the north which didn't bother me because I was heading south and the wind was at my back. I have a fabulous "long coat". My parents gave it to me for Christmas 3 years ago. I needed a new long coat for my trips to New York that I was doing as a consultant and my old coat was literally falling apart. My mom and I went and picked it out together. You can only get decorative long coats in Dallas, nothing that's truly warm because you don't really need it in Dallas. But my mom and I were in Albuquerque and we found a really nice one. It's all synthetic fibers but it's made to look like a shearling coat in dark brown colors. I always called my long coats "Nanook of the North" coats. Today, Patty called it my "Brown Bear" coat. Either way, it's very warm and has served me quite well, first in New York and now here.
So back to the story, I'm heading south with the north wind at my back and I'm toasty warm in my toasty warm long coat. I had noticed earlier how every branch of every tree had snow on it, lending to that Christmas Card effect. When the wind picked up, the boughs of pine trees started swaying in the wind and most of them lost their snow. Of course, that meant that big blobs of snow were suddenly falling. I was actually under one and thought I was being pelted by snowballs. It was really great to be able to see that happening. The wind also picked up a lot of loose snow and blew it around so ahead of me it looked rather blizzardous (that's probably not a word but it should be). The wind was coming in spurts so it wasn't a constant blizzard-looking condition. There was one gust that blew some of the loose snow in my face, but there was only that one gust so it wasn't
bad. The snow on the sidewalk was quite deep. Well, it was really snow on top of slush. I had walked in the slush on the way to the University. The slush had been brown from the sand that was on the road and then plowed over to the sidewalks. Now everything was white. The bottom of my coat was sometimes scraping the top of the snow. I was glad I was wearing my brown boots that are mid-calf high instead of my LL Bean thinsulated shoes that barely reach my ankles. When I got home, there was quite a bit of white on my coat. It stuck better to the furry part of the coat than to the suede-ish part of my coat, so my face had a white circle around it where the snow stuck to the trim on my hood. The bottom of the coat was white as were the shoulders and the top portion of both the front and the back. That was serious snow I was walking through!
Now I'm in the safety and comfort of my room at the house. I can occasionally hear the wind. It's not quite a howl . . . would it be a howlette? During the day you hear the big thuds when the snow slides off the roof, but not usually at night. There should be a lot of good thudding in the morning.
I wonder if they'll cancel classes or have a delayed start or just act as if nothing happened and have classes as usual. We'll see!
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