The engineering and architecture of the snow flake is really a very simple hexagonal lattice which forms regular symmetrical hexagonal prisms. Your car, however, will slip and slide the same whether you know that or not. Every winter I am fascinated by snow and our relationship to it. Where I live in central Texas, it rarely snows at all. The fresh white blanket of a recent snowfall, however, adds incredible beauty to the frozen and desolate landscape of winter. Winter in the Northland is a devastating and painful experience of cold and ice, temperatures so low you have to put a “minus” sign in front of the number. Yet when it warms up to just below freezing, it snows and we have to plow or shovel or go sliding into the ditch–love, hate snow flakes, you might say. Watching falling snow has such a calming effect on me that I can nap at the drop of hat during a fresh snow–I have a Youtube channel on my computer which only shows falling snow. Yet it is slippery, and on more than one occasion I have performed awkward ballet moves on my way down to the ground, proving once and for all that gravity is real and that I am mere flesh and blood that may be broken. My one and only spinout in a car occurred while driving in fresh snow. Snow flakes are of the most delicate combinations of frozen ice crystals, microscopic, really, but they have the power to wreak to havoc on the populations where they fall, clogging up streets and highways, slicking up sidewalks and driveways, making life just a little more dangerous than it already is. So one would have to say that snow is both a blessing and curse, but for the moment, I prefer to see it as a blessing.