School's out. The fall tour season ended for me on Friday just as the winter's first real snow began to fall. Cayce and I worked with a group of students from South Sumter High School located an hour north of Tampa. Most of them had never seen snow, so they were very excited. "It's snowing! It's snowing!" some yelled on Liberty Street when it was still hard to make out the flakes. (More dandruff than snow.) When we left Federal Hall to walk on Wall Street, the snow could be classified as a genuine flurry. One of the students asked if we could walk farther east, because it looked like it was snowing much harder four blocks away. I had to explain that it was just the poor visibility that came with snow and that there was no blizzard on Front Street.
After Trinity Church and a visit to the Charging Bull, it was snowing hard enough for me to put up my umbrella. I wasn't the only New Yorker doing that and it baffled many. I heard one girl on her cell phone talking to someone from home: "Do you know people up here use their umbrellas in the SNOW?" Another asked me why. "Well, you see, snow is actually frozen water and...oh, just wait." As we walked up Beaver Street, I heard several say, "Wow, I'm really wet!" and "It's not like the movies." There were very few complaints though. Two of the guys kept running their hands over my umbrella to gather enough snow for a snowball since nothing was accumulating on the wet sidewalks. But when we reached South Street Seaport, the wooden docks were covered with a blanket of snow...
...and South Sumter's first snowball fight instantly broke out.
Great picture. You should've seen my students the year it snowed in D.C. They went crazy over it. I would've let them have a snowball fight, but...alas, I was outvoted on that one.
Posted by: Jennifer | December 29, 2008 at 10:53 PM