Last day of August.

I'm not up to calling this a momentous month. It's one to mark, of course.
Any time we get a storm on the Gulf Coast, it's a remarkable month.

My daughter's been through a few of these now. Rita, Ike. Katrina was down
the road a bit, but she got to see the aftermath. A couple other storms
here and there. Now Harvey.

They mark the time.

We spent some time in the Northeast. The week we moved up that way, the area
we were in got the worst snow storm they'd had in a good long while. We'd been
there two days, and found ourselves in the middle of a two-foot blizzard.

Not that big a deal by the standards of some, but for a couple of goofballs
from Texas and southern California, you can be sure that we were impressed.

The part that made me pause was the wind. It was pretty much exactly the same
thing as being in a hurricane. Wind like hell, noisy, pushing on the house
and calling for entry.

But it was also the quietest storm I've ever been in.

Snow doesn't pelt the roof and sides of the house the way rain does, even in
the middle of a gale force wind.

But then, the biggest difference in the world came when the storm was finished.

I got to bring my three year old daughter out into the snow. Not quite the
first time she'd seen it, but definitely the first time she'd been in it up
to her chest.

Stone construction goes a long way to making hurricanes, or the blizzard
equivalent in snow country, less of an issue than we get down here. Down in
the islands, they build with concrete blocks, the moral equivalent for those
of us with few handy mountains to denude. At some point, I guess we'll figure
out that it makes sense to recognize what works, and mandate that.

Until then? Well, I guess we'll muddle along like we always do.

And I'm gonna work on figuring out how to spend a little more time in snow
country. I miss the mountains.