Winter Snow in Cambridge

           On Sunday, January 25th, the BBC weather service was promising something called "Thunder Snow" across the southeast of England.  For almost a week photos had been trickling in from "The North" showing mini-snow falls, and lovely pictures of fat snowflakes drifting past windows in places like St. Andrews and Edinburgh.  To state that I was green with envy of "The North" for it's snow, would be akin to calling a lion stalking the Savannah a "kitty hunting a mouse."
           For a little clarification, in my rather limited perception of the world "winter" isn't really it's own season without at least one snow day.  It is instead a long, miserable, extension of the wet soggy British fall.  Days of rain and temperatures cold enough to make you wear a coat, but mild enough for you to leave it halfway open, cursing the rain as you and your bicycle wind your way back and forth from point A to point B in a city where cycle safety is an afterthought.  If that.
           "Winter" in my mind is the winter that I remember from when I was a kid.  You could feel it sneaking up on you starting in September, with air that got drier and colder as the nights grew longer and longer, until they were so cold that taking in a breath too deeply or quickly meant stinging your lungs with the cold.  Winter is that time when the ground goes hard with a frost that won't let go for months on end.  Digging it's claws further and further into the ground as icicles start to grow off the eaves of roofs and any water pipe left on begins to crack in the cold.  Winter is unforgiving in it's bite, and the snow comes in tiny perfect dry flakes.  The kind that take a moment to melt after they've settled on the end of your nose.  Flakes that form fluffy white snow that lasts for days and days and days, coating frozen river banks and lining all the roads.  Snow that dusts up into the air when you kick it, and creates crashpads for sleds careening down hills.
           Winter, as I remember it, goes on and on and on and on.  The only thing colder than a night full of swirling snowflakes endlessly meandering from sky to earth, is the sunny morning after.  The only sound the cracking of the trees as they freeze.
           That is winter. 
           These long grey rainy days.  The ones I've had both in Portland and now in Cambridge, don't feel like winter.  Air temperatures between 42 f and 51 f just doesn't feel the same, and there is a distinct difference between crunching across frozen ground, and trudging through mud that's just barely cold enough to make life miserable.
           But on Monday, February 2nd, despite the BBC promising "conditions clear enough to view the stars" Cambridge got a tiny little taste of winter.  Miniature light snowflakes that dusted through the air to form an overnight blanket of snow.  Not much, an inch here and there, less in most places.              
           But it was one frozen night.
           One little taste of winter.
           And while it doesn't necessarily feel like enough, I guess it'll have to do.