The Wind is Coming

Winter has begun.

How do I know? Because yesterday's high was in the 70s, and tonight's low is going to be 37. And clear as a bell. Folks, that's what we call a "Blue Norther" here, and we usually don't see them until winter is well and truly in swing. Yesterday it started, with winds from the south, loud enough to scare the stray kitten... noon was calm... and by mid-afternoon, the wind was LOUD, 50 mph out of the northwest like a symphony for the damned, carrying tiny little mudballs all the way from the Panhandle to adorn all my car.

All summer long, Dallas aches for a touch of breeze. Unlike Kansas, battleground of the winds, where children get so used to it that they learn how to walk by leaning their upper bodies thirty degrees forward, North Texas truly knows wind for only three seasons per year. In the summertime, we sit in the very center of the high-pressure front that gives everybody else their summer thunderstorms... rainless, windless, and, if we're in the right part of the drought cycle, under a bronze sky.

Winter is something else, a fickle beast with claws that come all the way from the arctic with the single express purpose of tearing the life-heat out of you as you make your way shivering to the remote parking lot and try to get the key into your car door lock. The temperatures themselves would make your typical Yankee laugh. But the wind can get truly brutal if you're unprepared for it...

because the next day's high will be in the mid-60s....