Going through some of my photos the other day on my phone, I noticed a prompt that wanted to take me back to a year ago. That was the big winter blast that hit Texas and much of the south with single-digit highs and 3-5 inches of snow in the San Antonio and south Texas area.
These photos were taken when water and power were both out for days amidst temperatures that brought out the blankets, candles, and different freestyle ways of generating heat.
While I was out taking these neighborhood photos of the snow, little did I know that the state’s power grid at the time was trying to recover from a near collapse and millions of people were in the same cold boat we were in.
Nothing like harvesting the snow outside with buckets to toss in your bathtub to melt so you could use it to flush toilets…yeah, good times, right? Wish I’d thought to take photos or ask someone else to take photos of us hauling snow inside…but I was too in the moment trying to solve a problem.
It’s like the old saying, “experience can be the toughest teacher, because she gives the test first, and the lesson afterward.”
The last time San Antonio saw snow like this, it wasn’t accompanied by Siberian cold, but it did produce 13.5 inches of snow and shut down the city…that was January of 1985.
February, statistically speaking, brings the highest chance for snow to south Texas and San Antonio, but we’ve also seen it in other winter months within the last several years.
These photos really just depict the micro beauty of snow mixing with other natural elements. Even just the depth of the snow on the ground absorbing so much sound that you can imagine the silence grabbing your attention more than any random sound nearby.
This event that rolled in about a year ago was one that caught a lot of us off-guard, but the lessons we can learn and the beauty we can appreciate will stay with us for quite some time for that very reason.
It’s like the old saying, “experience can be the toughest teacher, because she gives the test first, and the lesson afterward.”
Steve Linscomb is a former television news reporter with more than 25 years experience in a number of small and large U.S. TV markets. His focus is in the development of the craft of fiction writing, more specifically historical fiction in both reading and in his current personal writing efforts.
He lives in San Antonio, Texas.
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