Today is a Friday. It is late afternoon. The temperature is 28°F after being 12° last night. A thick overcast obscures the sun, making for a cold, gray day. The weather forecast calls for ice pellets this evening. Ice pellets begin their existence as snowflakes at high altitude. The snowflakes fall into a layer of warm air where they turn into raindrops. The raindrops fall into very cold air near the ground and turn into ice pellets. A tenth of an inch of ice doesn’t sound like much until you try to walk or drive on it. Then, ice is very treacherous.
One winter I was driving to work, and I knew there was “black ice” on my street, so I drove very slowly as I approached an intersection with a stop sign. In fact, my car was going no faster than a person could walk. About 100 feet from the stop sign, I began tapping my brake pedal. Nothing happened, except every time I tapped the brake pedal, my car seemed to go faster. Seemingly in slow motion, my car leisurely slid past the stop sign and stopped in the middle of the intersection.
Another winter, I was driving my Jeep on a four lane divided highway through a rural part of Virginia. The highway was divided by a raised earthen median. There had been an ice storm and bare trees beside the highway glistened with ice, and some trees had branches broken off by the weight of the ice. There were just two vehicles within sight on the highway: my Jeep and a nondescript white sedan ahead of me in my lane. We were driving at the speed limit: 55 mph. The road was covered with snow, but I was pretty sure that under that snow there lurked a coating of ice on the highway. We came upon a tree limb lying beside the road – not unusual, but this limb was lying partly in the right lane. The driver of the sedan eased his car into the left lane to go past it, as did I. As the sedan driver tried to return to the right lane, his car began to fishtail. The rear of the car went one way, then the other, in increasingly large deviations. Then the car spun around in front of me and veered off the road toward the hilly median. The car hit the median and flipped into the air and came down on its roof on the edge of the road. Though I had been right behind him, I was able to stop my Jeep before it reached the accident, and I pulled off the road and onto the right shoulder. The driver of the sedan crawled out of his car through the side window and walked over to my Jeep. He appeared unhurt.
I put the window down. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he replied. But then he said, “I think I’ll go into the woods and lie down.” And so he did. I guess he was still some way from “okay.”
Today is also December 16. Is winter here yet? That depends on your definition of winter. For astronomers and scientists, astronomical winter this year begins on December 21. But for weather forecasters, meteorological winter always begins on December 1 – in the northern hemisphere. Down under in the southern hemisphere, the Aussies and Kiwis have their seasons in the wrong months. Their summer is December to February and their winter is June to August. Their autumn is March to May, and their spring is September to November. If you think having all their seasons in the wrong months is weird, know also that they insist on driving on the wrong side of the road. It’s like they live in some bizarre “opposite-world.” Maybe that comes from them being upside down all the time. Anyway, they seem to like it that way.
On Sunday – two days from now – the high temperature is supposed to be 70° with a chance of rain. Sub-freezing one day, balmy two days later: it’s December in Virginia.
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