Just when we had resigned ourselves to a mild, snow-less winter, a frigid little storm showed up to delight the kids with snow flurries and icicles and long, icy tromps through the neighborhood. They even got to skate around on top of the garden beds on one particularly bright and cold afternoon, while Baby Jem and I looked on from a window seat in a warm back room. Not used to single digit temperatures, we bundled up in layers of woollies and drank big mugs of hot chocolate and enjoyed our little bit of Winter.
Then, of course, the real King Winter arrived. We got about eight inches of snow in one night. It came heavy and swift while the kids slept, my three sweet loves completely oblivious to the wonderland growing outside their window. I'm always struck by how silent snow storms are in the south. When I lived in Boston, life went on as the snow fell - cars and people and noise and haste. In North Carolina, cities shuts down, people bundle up indoors, heavy snow knocks out power lines and states of emergency are declared. The only sounds are the crystalline swish of snowflakes and slow cracking of branches under an unfamiliar weight. It's a thick, puffy silence, all the world wrapped in a feather blanket