Dallas is not known for having lots of snow.  On the rare occasions Dallas HAS gotten some of the beautiful precipitation our city has literally shut down.  Northerners scoff and guffaw but the truth is we are ill equipped to deal with ice and snow as we do not receive it on any type of regular basis.  A few years ago Dallas had an actual, true “snow storm”.  It was the kind that felled 100 year old trees, knocking down power lines and yes, grinding the city to a halt.  We personally had no power for almost four days.  Logs in the fire weren’t cutting it and <gasp> our electronic devices were running out of juice.  The two survivalists in the neighborhood went on the grid long enough to crow about having generated power.  We could not even get out of our driveway.  The hill our house is on is steep and, under several sheets of ice, treacherous.  Snow blanketed all that had fallen within its path in a quiet that was almost deafening in its silence.  It was eerie … no humming, no buzzing, no white noise we’ve all become accustomed to; just white.  One by one neighbors began ambling out like baby hatchlings from their eggs:  wobbly and uncertain.  But no one had a better time than our wolfies.  To see them running over 30 mph through the snow was a thing of beauty to behold.  Everyone who watched was awestruck.  Our koi pond iced completely over and pictured here is our girl Cheyenne nosing around it.  The fish were schooling at the bottom and I think she was just as intrigued as we were.  English author J. B. Priestley once said:

“The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event.  You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?”

So as we are in the dog days of summer I thought it might be fun to revisit a time when everything was frozen.