In a wet year, we sell our snow, in the form of electricity, to California. In a dry year we buy from California's coal, oil and nuclear plants, and we pay dearly. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. If current global-warming projections are correct, they said, much of our snowpack could be gone within 50 years. As Joni Mitchell sings, you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
Urban snow is almost always slippery here because it's so wet.
Our terrain is steep, our removal equipment feeble, and our habits so ingrained that we won't take a day off, or even slow down. Most Seattle adults dread snow as earnestly as children long for it. It wasn't always so. Once upon a time there was a communal attitude of snugness and rest toward snow that was immortalized in Currier and Ives prints of rural New England. When roads were mostly dirt, frost and snow turned an autumn bog into a hard, smooth highway for horses and sleds.