For The Record: What Can We Predict?

I've long noticed, living in southern Texas, that it doesn't snow often. I've also long noticed, living in southern Texas, that when it does snow, it often happens in the winter just following a hurricane. So we just had a hurricane, and here comes winter. Is that enough to predict snow this particular winter here in southern Texas? My experience leads me to expect snow, even though it's rare here.

Some things are more predictable than the weather. One is that disasters, oddly, bring out the best in the people who go through them together. The basic compassion of shared humanity is in full bloom, and all the petty divisions disappear for a time. The just-drained neighborhoods (the backdrop for newscasts of daring boat rescues a week ago) are now filled with hundreds of extra cars: people who came to help tear out wet sheet-rock, pull up wet carpet, and move wet furniture out of the homes. The too-crowded streets have church relief trucks passing out sandwiches and water to people they never met, who are too grateful and too hungry to turn it down. I saw one relief truck get nearly mobbed in a neighborhood that is within a few miles of the rain gauge that set the new national record, and one young woman nearly brought to tears by some watermelon after a week of eating cold dry goods or things from a can. In some places the cleaner debris becomes a makeshift picnic-table: a door set across the washer and dryer out by the curb. And everyone has more friends and neighbors now than when we started.

It makes me oddly optimistic. Even the apocalypse doesn't seem entirely bad, from a certain angle. It's not that the predictions of doom and gloom have been entirely wrong, just that they leave out the power of compassion.