Snow. Not.

Snow in Seattle is a rare and wonderful thing. So rare in fact, that most of us don't know how to drive in it and because Seattle is ranged over seven hills it doesn't take much to shut down the city. Which is always kinda groovy. When those unexpected snow days arrive it means all that winter wonderland stuff that people in the midwest take for granted. There a rush to build a snow man, make those snow angels, take a long walk, leaving footprints in the virgin snow, only to hurry home for cocoa because it won't last long. All too soon the warm air will turn that snow to rain and it's back to winter as usual.

Did I mention that snow is rare here? Rare as in the last big snow fall (over 12 inches in our yard) was when The Child was in first grade. Rare as in I've had exactly one white Christmas here (although one year it did start snowing on Boxing Day). With very few exceptions, it also comes as a complete surprise. Oh, they predict it all the time. It's a sport among the local newscasters: "Snow in the forecast...how will it affect your commute?" Then it snows. In the mountains. But if they say it's going to fall in the lowlands you can pretty much safely bet that the most we'll get is rain. Which is what we get in the lowlands in winter. No, if it snows and sticks down here it is almost always a big, unbidden and joyful surprise. Sometimes it falls in the night and we wake up to that mystical white silence and spend the next hour listening to the school closures, with The Child fast by, fingers and toes crossed, praying for that most rapturous of all childhood delights, a snow day. More memorably it begins in the afternoon, when everyone is at work and school and then we all have impressive stories about how long it took us to get back home in the mess. We get the obligatory and familiar pictures of cars sliding into each other and of the one bozo who tries to make it up Queen Anne hill without chains. Good times.

But as I said, snow here is rare and unpredictable which is why I don't understand why they bother to note it in the forecast at all. All that does is get little children all hopped up for no good reason.

We had such a prediction yesterday. Even the local NPR affiliate was predicting snow, albiet in calm, FM tones as opposed to the apocolyptic message adopted by the TV stations. And The Child believed it. She went outside every half hour last night, checking the thermometer and reporting that it was "still falling". And she woke up this morning, predictably, to rain. You'd have thought Christmas was cancelled. She was soooooooooo sad.

We tried to warn her. We really did. We told her that it never snows when they say its going to. She countered with the one time in her memory that they predicted snow and we got snow. We tried to tell her that was a fluke. We knew exactly what she was feeling. That's how we felt when we were kids, growing up in the Northwest, where snow is rare. But she wasn't buying it. Her conviction that they wouldn't say it if it weren't true was unflinching.

Despite the disappointment and boo boo face this morning, hope springs eternal. It is currently 40 degrees and the sun is going down. "Just 8 more degrees and it's snow temperature," she said. It could be a very long winter.