Nor’easter Athena? Sure, I remember that one well. It was
way back in the autumn of ’12. If you ask more old timers like me, I’m sure
they’d vividly remember that storm.
It was a cold and blustery day, as I recall. Oh, I can
remember leaving work one afternoon and seeing the rain turn to freezing rain
and then to sleet. The air temperature was dancing on the fine line between wet
and frozen. Later that night, the sleet was hitting the bathroom skylight and
you could just hear the sound ringing all through the house. The sound of
winter coming early, it was. Then the next morning, as I drove to work and saw
the sporadic patches of wet snow on the ground …
… Well, a person doesn’t soon forget a sight like that.
So that was Athena, gone down in the annals of weather
history. Remind me some other time to tell you about the other named weather
phenomena of that bygone age.
Like Thunderstorm Clarissa. This was in July of ’13, in the
middle of a Monday afternoon. Oh, there were great peals of thunder and strikes
of lightning so bright it was like a fire come down from Heaven. Must have been
a quarter inch of rain that day. Windy, too. Turned my umbrella inside out, the
wind did.
And I can’t forget Fog Mitchell. As I recall, it was a humid
morning one September in the Teens. The fog was thicker than any pea soup you
could get in a restaurant back then. The middle of the morning and you had to
keep your headlights on, you did. And it still barely helped.
Well, my memory isn’t what it used to be when I was a young
man. Thank God they thought to name all those storms. It really helps us keep
them straight for posterity.
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