As Acidman used to say.

Expecting nine inches of snow tonight. Big whoop.

Around here, those of us who don’t forget from year to year, we can handle snow. And it’s actually kind of nice. When you have an idea a big storm is coming, anywhere in the plains states, you can sense it in a couple ways, all of which are cool, and a little spooky.

First of all, there’s a smell. Not like a rain smell, but more like a dirt smell, like the snow visited iowa and brought some sod along. Then the sound, or rather, the lack of it. As the front comes toward you, the snow, being an effective sound deadening blanket, is eerily quiet. Once, on I-80 near Ames, I saw the snow approaching from nearly twenty miles away- I got out of the car and watched it come in. As it got closer, the sounds of the cars headed into it and emerging from it became more and more muted. As the front passed overhead, the tiny white noise of billions of billions of snowflakes hitting the ground and each other masked all other noise, and then I was in it, almost no sound but my breathing and the snow. Cars passing by less than a stones throw away were all but silent. Easy to understand how people get lost in whiteouts.

Then, if you hold out your hand a bit, you can get a good little fistful of flakes, lick them off your palm, taste the sunshine far above. Midwesterners will understand, I don’t imagine anyone else will.