Crisplessness
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Hi I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook. Types of coffee and several thousand miles aren't the only things that separate residents of the Pacific northwest from the Atlantic coast. Weather also divides the two, as former East coaster-now western denizen David Laskin explains.

Complain about the rain in Seattle and you won't get any sympathy from me - as far as I'm concerned we don't get enough of it, and when the heavens open I'm out there greeting every shower. But one thing that does get under my skin about our winters is the absence of crispness. I was raised in the Northeast and I loved how the crisp clarity of autumn hardened into winter's crystalline brilliance. Frozen sunshine, I've heard it called, when the sky is so cold and blue it makes your eyes ache. That's definitely not the style out here. As novelist Tom Robbins puts it, autumn in the Pacific Northwest is "like a wet rag on a salad," to which I would add - in winter, the salad turns to mush. At the height of the rainy season we average almost one one-hundredth of an inch of rain an hour. In weather like that, crispness goes faster than the Wicked Witch of the West: "I'm melting."

I know winter has really settled in when the only crunching sound I hear comes from my kids eating their Wheaties. Oh how I miss the crunch of dry packed snow underfoot! Instead we get a recurring chorus of plop, slap, drip - the plop of light rain, our specialty, on yesterday's leftover puddle, the slap of windshield wipers going through their repertoire of speeds as the rain intensifies, slackens, then picks up again, the drip drip drip of - well, you get the idea.

You can read more about the cultural and weather divide-- as interpreted by commentator David Laskin -- on our website at www.weathernotebook.org.