Winter in Texas

This is a picture of my dad and sister in the winter of 1948. We'd had a lot of snow on the farm and someone snapped this picture. My dad appears to be on the road which was unpaved and most likely impassable until this stuff melted.  I was a baby, probably three months old. The farm was north of McKinney which is about 30 miles north of Dallas. The house belonged to the neighbors across the road. Ours was a bit smaller and didn't have the decorative greenery.

Snow in North Texas is something you snap pictures of because it isn't that common. Snow in Austin? Doubly so.

Forrest's parents snapped a picture of their house, likely in the winter of 1939/1940. The snow was unusual so they took a picture of the little one bedroom house surrounded by snow (and not much else) that FFP's dad had built with his own and his family's labor. (And lumber from the company on the sign.) That's his mom posing. [For locals who know the area, this is in Rosedale.]

In 2004 it snowed a tiny bit in Austin. We took a picture of the backyard where we lived on Shoal Creek. 

Holidailies has this prompt today:

Winter is coming!
Tomorrow is the first day of winter. What do you consider the perfect winter day?

We snap pictures when it snows because it's a rare occurrence. In Austin it doesn't even snow every year. Fortunately the requirements for a perfect winter day for me don't involve snow. No.  I prefer a crisp blue sky. No wind. But cold enough that the sun is welcome but doesn't really warm you up when you exercise and you need to leave on a jacket and maybe a dashing scarf to stay warm.. My perfect winter day might just be next Tuesday when the forecast here is a low of 37, a high of 62, mostly clear with no chance of precipitation. I'll be playing tennis for a couple of hours in the cool morning, bundled up in sweats, a hat and sunglasses defending against the winter sun. Then I'll rush through a shower, dress up a bit, and go to a noon time party where I'll drink a Bloody Mary and have some party food while looking out over a snowless and bright Austin with construction cranes relentlessly changing our skyline on a day that hardly seems like winter. When we walk back to our apartment the cool air will refresh my face, flush from drinking alcohol in the middle of the day.