Early December snow in Washington is often fleeting, fragile and fast to melt, so a lot of what fell on Friday disappeared on Saturday, leaving behind mainly moisture and memories.
By Saturday afternoon, Washington’s official temperature had reached 45 degrees, and the blanket of snow, never truly dense, seemed to be yielding territory by the minute.
The snow had amounted to about an inch, but it seemed almost to visibly retreat when confronted with relatively warm air and the light, however milky, of a cloud-shaded sun.
On Saturday, a latter-day François Villon might have devoted his rhetorical efforts not so much to asking after the snows of yesteryear, as those of yesterday. (Recognizing that “yesterday” was in this case Friday.)
Evidence continued to arrive or be discovered on Saturday about responses to the quasi-historic snowfall. Historic in the sense that Friday alone provided the greatest amount of snow here in any December in seven years.
This was so although the total was only about an inch.
Late Friday the Chinese Embassy in the United States posted a photo on one of its social media accounts, saying “Here is a snowman built by our embassy staff.”
Shown in the photo was what resembled a playful head-and-shoulders bust of a fanciful creature, one with a round face, smiling mouth and two large ears resembling those of a rabbit.
The durability of the sculpture was uncertain. By the time of its late-afternoon report on Saturday’s weather in Washington, the National Weather Service said that little snow remained on the ground.
It listed the amount on the ground as a trace, too small to measure.
The high temperature of 45 degrees was five below normal for Washington on the 6th of December. It created something like a chill.
The sensation of coolness probably stemmed at least in part from the donation of heat from air to ground that helped provide the thermal wherewithal for snow melting.
During many hours, particularly in the morning, the air seemed filled with mist and moisture, and gave an almost eerie sense of gray fog threading its way between the bare branches of distant trees.
Dew points came within a few degrees of the actual temperature. That suggested that for much of the day, the atmosphere was close to condensing into moisture, and creating a clammy early winter dampness.
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