Atlantic Beach Wintry Mix

I usually don't mind running in light rain or in snow.  But this morning's forecast called for that stuff that meteorologists have come to call "wintry mix," a mixture of snow and ice and freezing rain that is too wet to brush off and so cold that it seems to penetrate anything but Gore-Tex.  It can be miserable.   I have been on some memorable long runs in wintry-mix conditions. 

But I awoke early and got a mile or two in before it started in earest, so I was warmed up a bit.  By the third mile my Early Winters shirt, which normally will repel light moisture, was becoming soaked, and I could see and feel little flecks of sleet mixed in with the rain.  I passed a couple, inexplicably carrying trekking poles (on a wide sidewalk), who were bundled up and water-proofed so tightly that I would not have been able to recognize them had they been acquaiintances.  Some workmen were carrying plywood sheets into a house under construction, and I exchanged waves with them, smelling that wonderful fragrance of fresh lumber.  I can sometimes take a kind of perverse pleasure in being nearly the only person out in harsh conditions, and I did that this morning, distracting myself from the cold rain by looking around at everything, smelling everything.  I saw some cute beach houses on some of the side streets I had not yet explored.  This street had what seemed to be a box of pastel sticks upended, facing the cold blue-green ocean:

It really wasn't bad at all! - being out of doors, almost no traffic, only the occasional carpenter or sidewalk-trekker out to share the biting, clean fragrance of the rain, and to hear and see the gentle crash of the surf on the other side of the dunes. In reality, it was good to be out here putting in a few miles before the heavier rain came later in the morning, as if these miles were provisions, as satisfying to accumulate as firewood stacked carefully on the back porch before a snowstorm.