Like an Easterner caught in their first California earthquake, I'm just fascinated (though probably quite a bit less frightened) by our first true snow of the season.

I knew it was coming. The weather forecast and ominously ring-like radar picture made it clear. Nevertheless, I was still eager with anticipation as I walked to the bus stop at around two in the afternoon.

Waiting for the bus, I felt small pinpricks of water. So tangible was my impatience that I held out my gloved hand, trying to tell if the tiny droplets were crystalline, or just really cold. They weren't really floating, still mostly pelting in their occasional pinpricks of cold.

After a few minutes it started picking up a bit, to where I could look into the distance and see the array of lines, each one a tiny droplet of freezing rain. I lamented (in my own tiny way) the fact that a digital camera couldn't capture the beauty of the falling water, and I thought for a moment whether I had my videocamera in my backpack, but as irony would have it, Adam was returning it to me at the very meeting I was progressively becoming later for, as the bus obstinantly refused to arrive.

Though I've been in snow several times (skiing, mostly), I've never lived in the stuff, and so didn't have a concept of the many faces of snow. My eskimo vocabulary would probably have about four words: fresh powder, packed powder, slush, and that stuff that turns a three hour drive from Tahoe to Berkeley into a 12-hour tour past accident after accident.

The interface between this cold, cold rain and true snow was something of a mystery to me, and I idly wished that I did have my video camera on me, so that I could point it into the distance and focus it a little closer, so that I might capture this transition that was clearly imminent.

Then, silently and without fanfare, between one heartbeat and the next, the entire array of falling droplets stopped. I don't mean that the rain ceased; I mean that the droplets stopped, instantly turned white, and progressed at a far more leisurely, and less linear rate. The world became hushed, as I never really noticed the white noise that the small rain was making until it was replaced with visual white noise.

It was just magic. I'm sure in my happy wonder I looked like a goof to the people driving by me, no doubt accustomed to the wonder, or perhaps having seen it earlier, just down the road.

Me, I enjoyed the snow, for the five minutes that it lasted, almost as much as I enjoyed again on the bus ride back home, when it made Forbes Avenue look like Manhattan in the movies, for just a few minutes.

But I have to say that right now, at two in the morning, when it's been snowing for several hours, nearly an inch of the white stuff has blanketed my car, and the world went from Fall to Winter overnight, that I enjoy it most of all.