The Last Thunderstorm


Meteorologists know the North Atlantic Oscillation as a large-scale pattern of climate variability, an arctic mass of pressure rising and falling to drive winter weather with the repercussive mandate of a fulcrum. Those of us laymen unmindful of the cause are familiar with the consequences: when the phenomenon is in a high-pressure negative phase, one of which it now appears to be entering, it delivers to the eastern United States a wintery melange.

Snow will fall, they say, before the week is out.

ON A FINE WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON: Flurries arrived. I gasped. I giggled. I reveled.

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