The hours of Friday afternoon in the District, however quiet they may have seemed, were also hours of cool and seemingly subdued anticipation, notable for being the last hours before what was expected to be an overnight snowfall.
Washington, D.C
Daylight hours in D.C. represented a chill calm before expected storm
Just before 3 p.m., the temperature in the District was given officially as 50 degrees. The hour before, and the hour after, both registered 48.
Those do not seem especially warm readings, and Friday did have something of a mid-February, late-winter feel to it. In fact, those readings were almost exactly average for Feb. 16. In Washington, the average high temperature for Friday’s date is 49 degrees.
Although they are not recognizably warm, neither do such readings as Friday’s nevertheless create the inherently shivery sense that might make snow seem inevitable. If Friday presented to the meteorologically innocent any signs of snow, perhaps faint hints could be found in the sky.
In midafternoon, broad expanses of blue could be seen. Here and there, amid the blue, occupying perhaps half of the sky, thin, wispy, feathery clouds appeared. Something about them suggested existence at high levels of the atmosphere, where the cold is great.
Perhaps more significant, in the west, regions of gray cloud appeared. Given knowledge of the forecast, their eastward encroachment on this region seemed possibly portentous, as perhaps the forerunners of what was to come.
Amid this implacably expanding blanket of gray, the sun could still be seen. But it could be seen as if in a failing struggle to assert itself. It could be seen as if behind a curtain, visible but seemingly in confinement, dialed down and capable of only curiously dim illumination.
An attempt at an objective assessment of human behavior on the streets and in at least one supermarket found few suggestions of any great rush to make preparations for what was predicted to come.
In midafternoon, almost all of the staples for winter storm survival seemed readily available on store shelves. Bread seemed easily accessible, and milk, too. Checkout lines did not seem long.
Although snow has not been plentiful here this year and storms relatively few, Friday afternoon, an afternoon in what has been a far warmer month than the average, may have betrayed some signs of what was to come. But all in all the afternoon did not seem likely to foster foreboding.
That was the way Washington might be remembered, mere hours before the snow was to start.