Chill

It snowed and sleeted in DC last night. When I was a kid, and my family traveled by car from Southern California or Texas into New Mexico and Colorado, driving for hours sometimes at odd hours, and we would stop along the way, just after having reached patches of snow and the chill on the car windows, sometimes sighting antelope, and we would get out of the car, and that dry cold would hit my face, that clean smell of crisp higher altitude air, that snow on the ground so precious to a kid raised in the tropics or subtropics,... that's how it feels early on this quiet morning in DC.