<chirp, chirp> “Moire here.”

“Uncle Sy! Uncle Sy! It’s snowing again!”

“Yes, Teena, I noticed. I’ll be over to help you build a snowman in a little while.”

“Yay! There’s so much snow coming down. I bet there’s a kazillion snowflakes!”

“Maybe even more. And no two of them are exactly alike.”

“Yeah, that’s what Mommy said. I went outside a while ago and caught a bunch on my coat sleeve like you showed me. All different shapes — stars and pencils and almost-round ones and spiky balls. I can’t remember them all. How do we know that they never match? Did someone look at them with a computer camera?”

“Whoa, that’s too big a job for even a really fast computer with a really good camera. No, it goes back to how snowflakes grow up.”

“Ha-ha, that’s funny! Little baby snowflake grows up to be a big Mommy snowflake!”

“Well, in a way that’s what happens. You know clouds are really made of teeny water droplets, right?”

“Yeah, Mommy says it’s a fog, but way up in the air. But the fluffy ones are pretty.”

“Yes they are, but inside some of the not-fluffy clouds it can be very cold and windy.”

“Danger cold?”

“Very danger cold. Cold enough for some of those teeny droplets to freeze and become ice droplets. When an ice droplet touches a water droplet they merge to make a bigger piece of ice. The winds blow the ice up and down between wet places and cold places inside the cloud over and over again. The piece of ice grows and grows until it gets so heavy it falls down out of the cloud.”

“Like a roller coaster! But wouldn’t that just make round ice? That’s not what I caught on my sleeve.”

“Sometimes it does. Remember that hail storm we had last year?”

“Oooo. Yeah, we got inside just in time. Those hailstones went pitter‑patter all over the sidewalk and the windows.”

“Just be very glad they were only pinkie‑nail‑sized. I was in a storm once where the hail was as bigger than your shooter marble. It made dents on my car.”

“WOW! That would hurt!”

“It certainly would. I hope you’re never in one of those ice storms, just stars‑and‑pencils snow like you saw on your sleeve. Stars‑and‑pencils happens when the winds inside the cloud are gentler and give the teeny ice droplets time to grow a different way.”

“Different how?”

“Want to do an experiment?”

“Over the phone?”

“Sure. Get your bag of marbles and a lid from one of your board game boxes. Say when you’re ready.”

“OK … ready!”

“OK, Put the lid on the floor face‑down but prop it up so one corner is lower than the other three.”

“Umm … ready!”

“Now slowly pour your marbles into the lid so they lie together in one layer. Slowly, we don’t want them going all over the floor.”

“That’d make Mommy mad. Ooo, pretty! They make a honeycomb pattern. I see a lot of hexa–, um…”

“Hexagons. Good girl, you did that just right. That pattern is a lot like how water molecules arrange themselves when they freeze. When a new molecule walks up to some ice, it tries to touch as many other molecules as it can. That automatically makes hexagons.”

“Oh! Teeny hexagons grow up to be snow hexagons! Ha-ha!!”

“Mm-hm, and depending on conditions some rows grow fast to make flat plate snowflakes or a different set of rows might grow quickly to make frilly stars.”

“But why don’t they all grow the same?”

“Because of how messy it is inside that cloud. Winds blowing up and down and sideways, wet places and not‑so‑wet places scattered all over everywhere. Two baby snowflakes starting right next to each other can wind up on opposite sides of the cloud with entirely different stories to tell.”

“But then how can different sides of the same snowflake be the same?”

“They’re on the same flake so they’re always close together as the flake grows. They don’t get a chance for different stories. OK, I just finished up. It’s snowman time.”

“Yay!”

~~ Rich Olcott