This week’s photo challenge asks,”How do you fuel the fires of optimism?” Few things are as chock full of optimism as a child at play. So today, a snow day (#Snowmageddon2016 #South), was a perfect day to be that child. After checking the property for damage after freezing rain, sleet and 6 inches of snow, the inner 8-year-old forgot — for a few minutes — about the 50-something in which she lives.
Shadows angle across a snow-dusted deck.
Even more “shadowed” we liked this week:
Winter has its moments of beauty.
After a few springlike days, winter came roaring back, taking Round 2. The system dropped freezing rain, several inches of sleet and topped it all off with snow. Schools were shut down for days and traffic stopped on I-40 and I-55 in northeastern Arkansas.
The heavy winter layer took all the joy out of the daffodils in back of the office. So sad.
The last few weeks have given Arkansans many opportunities to perfect those snow- and ice-handling tactics. Even so, any mention of wintry precip can generate quite a buzz. So much so, that one of our local National Weather Service forecasters has taken to calling mention of flakes an “excitement snow.” And some of the local TV meteorologists talk about “French toast obsession” as a metaphor (or is it a simile?) for the pre-storm shopping panic as customers clear the shelves of milk, eggs and bread.
However, where snow is concerned, we still we have a long way to go. Out late celebrating my husband’s birthday with friends, we finally left the restaurant when there was about an inch of snow in the ground. What would normally be a 30-minute drive home stretched into an hour-plus and with each minute moving westward, the world became surreal. Cars in ditches. Cars on curbs, and cars simply abandoned in the street. By the time we got to halfway home, we felt as if we were driving around the set of “The Walking Dead,” as drivers who had abandoned cars simply wandered in the middle of major arteries and in front of still moving traffic. Scary. Little Rock PD worked 151 accidents the night of Feb. 8. That doesn’t count the ones they couldn’t reach.
Two days later we braced for another 5-6 inches in a storm system that turned out to be most unpredictable. During the early part of the prediction phase, the inch count inched up from 3 inches to maybe 6. Then somewhere in late afternoon, one of the TV forecasters broke ranks saying the storm might not bring anything at all. The state held its breath — made plans for school and office closures, cancelled evening activities. We waited. And waited. Finally around 9 p.m. or so, a big fat snowflake fell on the deck. Then a few dozen cousins fell too. Then it stopped.
Snow it goes in the Southern winter.
We had a little sleet, freezing rain and snow here in the Ouachitas today. Backyard spider webs captured the sleet beautifully.
Just love cardinals in winter. (Many in Arkansas love the St. Louis variety in the summer too.)
(Apologies to Jerry Lee Lewis, of course.) Winter likes to make water do interesting things: create stalactites, delicate snowflakes and spheres of ice. Here, a couple of samples of what water can do.
(Catching that little drop of water falling from an icicle took many, many frames.)
Posts from winters past:
What a difference a few weeks can make. The top photo was taken the week before Thanksgiving. The bottom photo was taken around lunchtime today — the snow and sleet courtesy winter storm Cleon.
One of the nice things about the weekly photo challenge is that the prompt gets you to see the world in another way; or see an object in a new light; or at the very least from a new angle. Our take on the details is below.
The (Urban-Wildlife) Interface 
