Ahhh snow. There you are...

An official welcome to winter in the form of weather this entire day...and something to last rest of today and well into the night.

(so the rumors go)

Which probably explains the rush on the supermarkets.

Soup you know.

 Well, and the misguided thought that we will all be snowed in for days to come.

We have a lot of residential implants from other places in the nation (Prescott is one of the top places to retire) that are use to much colder and snowier weather during the winter...which tends to make those people freak out.  A lot.  This takes many forms, but most often it's the form of getting into a car that is not equipped for any kind of weather...while peering over their dashboards as they descend their very steep driveways, which are also not conducive to any kind of weather other than sun...and drive crazily slip sliding around town.  It's not as bad as it used to be when I was a kid...when you would eventually dig your way out of your neighborhood after sledding and missing school for 3 days because of all the snow, and then drive slowly down the roads playing obstacle course with all the elderly people in their Cadillacs who were strewn all over the roads.

That was fun.

Like a free-for-all bumper car situation only with real grown up cars.

Or pool.

The neighborhood I grew up in was out of town...and my mother lived by the rule, "...if we can make it out of the neighborhood...we can make it anywhere in town!"  and off we'd go, to see if we could make it up the last big hill that led out of our neighborhood.  When I was in high school, this was much easier as we would just all pile into my bug...my mother driving us slowly through the icy roads.  The thing about a bug is:  They were originally made in Germany...it snows in Germany, German residents still drive Bugs, this is a good sign.  Bugs are small, making it easy to weave in and out of stalled traffic and old people standing on the side of the road scratching their heads.  Bugs are light, and you can just push them back on the road if they slide off (I know this from experience)  They're also cute for a young high school girl to drive (this has nothing to do with the snow...but I did love my Bug)

I can still judge what is happening outside when I first wake up, by the fuzzy light coming through the cracks in the curtains and the muffled sounds of no cars speeding around on the roads...I can roll over in bed and peek out the curtains and see the flurries coming down and covering our part of the world and welcome the snow with a happy sigh and a smile.

Fifteen minutes later?

I hear the gentle symphony of emergency vehicle sirens all around town rescuing the panicking hordes of people who are sure they're going to have to start chopping up furniture to keep warm and may have to eat their family pets if they don't get to the grocery.

Right.

Now.

It's strange that all these cold weather implants retain is the idea of hot food or possible starvation, but not the skill that it takes to drive on icy snow covered roads.

I welcome snow and weather with the open arms of someone who has lived in the Southwest her whole life.  It's an exciting thing...a novelty.  Here I sit, creating my life in Arizona...land of one of the only natural saguaro forests, only I'm all the way up a mile high...so we experience more seasons here than other places in Arizona.

Which I love.

And here I sit, gazing out of the windows of Snap Snap...watching the snow fall, collecting on cars...crossing my fingers for some kind of measurable accumulation...

And trying to remember how much soup I have at home in the cupboards.