Snow!

Yesterday's rain turned into today's snow.  When we awoke this morning, large flakes were falling amid the rain.  It did not last long, and it did not stick.  All it did was leave a slush on the porch.

In my experience, which admittedly is 20 years out of date, it snows enough to cover the ground slightly about once every 5-8 years in East Texas.  My mother-in-law has been in Texas for at least 5 years, and she said this is the first snow she has seen here.

The largest snow in my lifetime was about 1950 when, as I remember it, there were probably several inches on the ground.  The big treat when it snowed was to make snow ice cream with milk, sugar and vanilla.  Only several days ago I saw a story that snow contains too many potentially harmful bacteria to let children eat it.  If the truth be known, snow was probably dirtier in 1950 than it is today.  In those days we had sawmill boilers belching out black smoke all day long, and the bacteria count has not likely changed.  There was a time in the late Cold War era when nuclear testing contaminated snow with dangerous amounts of radioactive fallout.   Snow ice cream was not a good idea in that era.