Winter… when icicles hang by the wall (Shakespeare)… when earth stands hard as iron, water like a stone (Rosetti)… when it’s lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you! (Parish)

We know about ice, we know about frost, we know about the cold wind blowing, and here in western New York, we also know about SNOW. We know about lake effect from Lake Erie, and lake effect from Lake Ontario. We know about mountains of snow in Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Ogdensberg. The late Ted Markham told me once that his dad had had the last horse-drawn mail route in New York, because it needed a sleigh in winter.

What do we REALLY know about snow?

Snow is water in delightful frozen forms. It forms in crystals, coalescing around a micro-speck of dirt, dust, soot, radioactive fallout, or what have you. So maybe your mother had something when she told you not to eat the stuff. (Always listen to your mother.)

The crystals form hexagonally, with either six points or six sides. Famously, no two are alike. Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley was so fascinated by them that he begged his Vermont farming parents to buy him a cumbersome glass-plate camera, and spent literally the rest of his life photographing, studying, and admiring these tiny subjects, each of which endured for only a few seconds, and yet was preserved forever.

Snow looks like snow, but most of us are aware that the flakes vary in size. My grandmother in Rhode Island observed that when the flakes suddenly increase in size, it’s usualy a sign that the fall is about to end, and I’ve found her observation true. But besides sizes, they also vary in shape.

Most famously we have our six-pointed star, the snowflake of cartoons and greeting cards and every child’s imagination. They form with radial symmetry, more or less… nothing’s perfect in nature, and as a snowflake falls its environmental conditions change second by second, so irregularity is the order of the day.

But we can also get six-sided plates, or six-sided lobed plates… sometimes with the “star” embedded within. Or, we could get open-ended six-sided columns.

There’s also needle snow, the shape of which is pretty much what it sounds like.

Look closely if things get very slippy underfoot. You may be “enjoying” graupel, sort of a tiny snowball or snow slab. This happens when atmospheric water collects and freezes on the snowflakes as they fall. Layers of graupel are prone to avalanche.

In a very implausible set of conditions, Florida residents in the Palm Beach-Stuart area experienced grapel last month. (It didn’t stick.)

A blizzard is a severe sustained snowfall with high winds. A snow squall is much the same, but of short duration. Either one may produce a whiteout, in which visibility almost instantly goes to almost zero. “No cloud above, no earth below – a universe of sky and snow!” (Whitter)

Winter can also bring freezing rain, when the surface is colder than the sky, or sleet, when rain freezes on the way down.

Our area only caught the edge of the Blizzard of 1888, which dumped four feet of snow on Albany and almost five feet in Saratoga Springs. Over 400 people died. The blizzard of 1978 had much the same footprint, and multiple locations in Rhide Island reported 40 inches of snow, but “only” a hundred people died.

In February of 1940 the Davenport Orphanage girls in Bath had to go to school by sledge for a week, and snow still lay on the ground in April. After a 1958 blizzard, children in Prattsburgh could climb drifts and reach above the telephone wires. Right where we are snow fell and frost formed every month in 1816, “the year without a summer.”

But as long as it’s not excessive, snow can be one of the most lovely experiences North America has to offer. Even if you only watch it through the window, with a warm robe and a good book in hand.