Southern surprise

My phone rang at 6:30 this morning, fifteen minutes after the alarm had sounded but before I'd managed to crawl out of the warm bed. It was my daughter, Kim, whose first words when I answered were, "Look out your window; it's snowing."

Local weather forecasters had predicted we'd have a "wintry mix" this morning, so I expected to see a few tiny flakes in the air. Instead, the ground was frosted white and the flakes were big, fat, fluffy ones. I've been in Louisiana for 30 years and have never seen more than a very light dusting of snow here, so this was exciting.

I couldn't wait to show it to Butch and Kadi. As I put on shoes and threw a coat over my bathrobe, I was sorry Butch wouldn't be able to see it and wondered how long it would take him to discover that something was different. Not long, it turned out. He hadn't taken more than three or four steps outside before he felt the snowflakes kissing his cheeks, pointed his nose skyward, wagged his tail, and turned around a few times with his head in the air.

Kadi, of course, noticed the white blanket and the falling flakes as soon as the door was open and raced outside into the thick of it. She played a while longer than usual before asking to come back inside.

After our first venture in the snow, we had to wait another hour before there was enough daylight to take pictures. Here's what my backyard looked like then:



A few minutes later, the snow still falling fast, I walked back through the house and out the front door. Here's the little patch of woods across the road:



The pretty tree at the right of this photo is my neighbor's pear tree:



By 1:00 in the afternoon, the snow had melted off of all the roads, a lot of the lawn, and most of the trees. This is how the backyard looked then:



If you look at Butch's footprints in this early afternoon shot, you can tell that we'd had at least two or three inches:



In fact, back near the garden shed, the snow was all the way up to Kadi's belly: