First snow

Woke up this morning to snow in the garden. It had been snowing hard in the evening, but the temperature was +2C, so I didn't think it'd settle. It did, although not in town. What a difference a month makes. Take a look at the same two scenes photographed on 14 October (click here and scroll down to the third and fourth photos on this entry). First snow does not linger. I guess this winter will be little different from past Warsaw winters, but starting later, finishing sooner and less intense. I do miss those -20C mornings, blue sky, hoar-frost* in the trees, crisp snow on the ground... How many days like that will we get this winter? [Supplementary: The snow had all gone by the time I returned home this evening.] * For my Polish readers, hoar-frost is szadź in Polish; you'd be forgiven for not knowing this word as Stanislawski, the long-standing authority in English-Polish dictionaries, gives the word, and its synonym, rime-frost, as szron. The Oxford University Press dictionary gives the better result.