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An English Rose in Georgia: Snow in Coastal Georgia
Lesley Francis new 2022.jpg

I will be glad to turn the page on January, which has been a month of loss for our family, and I hope that the rest of 2025 is better. In my opinion, the month was not helped by the recent winter storm Enzo. I didn’t realize that the weather channel started naming winter storms in 2012 although there is still some controversy about how helpful it is, and the use of winter storm names is still not consistent.

Choosing to live in Coastal Georgia for nearly 16 years means that I have become very familiar with the naming of tropical storms and hurricanes.

This began in 1953, when the United States began using female names for storms and, by 1978, both male and female names were used to identify Northern Pacific storms.

This was then adopted in 1979 for storms in the Atlantic basin and there is now a list of male and female names which are used on a six-year rotation. The only time that there is a change is if a storm is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate.

So, although I had to come to terms with the risk of hurricanes, high humidity, mosquitoes, snakes and other challenges when I relocated from London, England I thought that I would never again have to shovel snow or endure temperatures below freezing.

Clearly, I was wrong and frankly I now know a lot more about snow than I ever wanted to know.

Sure, it is pretty to look at and it is lovely for children to build snowmen and play in, but I had already had enough snow to last me a lifetime when I moved here. In a nutshell, I did not come to beautiful Coastal Georgia to be that cold! When we endured about an inch of snow in 2018, I felt very lucky to be traveling on the West Coast and miss the whole thing! Apparently, our recent snowfall is comparable to 1989 when we had around 4 inches. The consensus is that winter storm Enzo definitely brought historic levels of snow to the South – more than in some parts of the traditionally snowy northern states. It did amuse me that many local people who were initially enchanted by the magical winter wonderland we woke up to on Tuesday morning were ready by Wednesday for an end to it!

For snow to form, there needs to be moisture in the atmosphere and low temperatures.

Depending on humidity levels in the atmosphere, when temperatures drop below 32°F, water vapor condenses directly into ice without going through the liquid stage. Once an ice crystal has formed, typically in clouds, it absorbs and freezes additional water vapor from the surrounding air, growing into a snow crystal or snow pellet, which then falls to Earth. Snow appears white, but it is actually translucent. It is the light reflecting off of it that gives it the whiteness.

Snow is amazing stuff.

It captures pollutants, absorbs sound, and acts as an insulator since it is about 95% composed of trapped air. Snowflakes are hexagonal in shape, meaning six sided, which is created by their oxygen and hydrogen molecules.

And surprisingly, snow not only makes a crunchy sound when you walk on it but also makes a high-pitched noise when it melts due to the release of the trapped air bubbles. Maybe my dogs can hear this, but I certainly did not last week.

It is a common belief that Eskimos have 50 words for snow and although my personal opinion is that they can keep them, it is interesting to find out where this myth came from. It originated with anthropologist Franz Boas, who studied and shared the life of the local Inuit people of Baffin Island, Canada in the late 1800s in order to experience eating a lot of seal meat and learning their language. It is true that there are many different words for snow in the Eskimo-Aleut language including qanuk meaning ‘snowflake’, muruaneq meaning ‘soft deep snow’ and pirta: ‘blizzard’. However, it is not straightforward to compare to the English language, in which we might have an entire sentence describing snow, to a fusional language such as the Eskimo-Aleut family which has long, complex words to achieve the same thing.

I think it is appropriate to say goodbye this week with a question from one of my favorite American authors, the great John Steinbeck, from his 1962 book Travels with Charley: In Search of America: “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?”

God bless America and enjoy winter while it lasts!

Lesley grew up in London, England and made Georgia her home in 2009. She can be contacted at lesley@francis. com or via her full-service marketing agency at www. lesleyfrancispr.com.

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