A blue moon occurs every two or three years. Snowfall in southern Louisiana, then, is the equivalent of about four or five blue moons. And snowfall to the extent that we saw last week—upwards of nine inches in many parts of the parish—is the sort of event you can live to a ripe old age and never see. It was more snow than, not only me, but both of my parents had ever seen fall here. More snow than my grandparents had ever seen. It was a once-in-a-greatgrandparent kind of snowfall. And it was unforgettable.

Tuesday, January 21——We woke up to find the ground already white with snow. As many forecasts as we had seen confirming the high likelihood of snow, it was something we had to see to believe. Bands of snow began falling at 7:30, and the snow kept coming and coming, whipped around by 30 mph gusts, slowing for one minute only to fall harder the next, and even watching it fall from the sky with our own eyes, it was still hard to believe it was happening. Foot-long icicles forming on the cottage roof. Snow settling into every crevice of the live oak’s trunk and branches. Cabbages in the vegetable garden being swallowed up by the falling white powder. The unrelenting snow fell for seven hours until everything was covered in white.

Wednesday, January 22——It’s amazing what snow reveals. Even a place as familiar to me as downtown Catahoula, dusted with nine inches of fine white powder, was like I’d never seen it before. When I woke up at sunrise on Wednesday morning, the snow had stopped, and the sun was making an appearance, but the snow was still as thick on the ground as it had been the day before. I walked from my cottage on St. Rita Highway to the old boat landing on Talley Road, step by careful step, sliding on dark patches of ice, in the kind of polar blue ambience you might expect to find in the Arctic.

I’ll never forget the sight of snow blanketing the banks of Catahoula Lake, and the faint pink sun through the mist on the water. It was only ten degrees, and oddly not even that cold—there was no wind at all that day—although I did feel a little delirious from the shock of the scenery. We walked to my Aunt Sylvia’s house to stand under her giant live oak, one of the largest live oaks in the parish and a dream to stand beneath on any ordinary day of the year. Well, the snow had revealed an even further grandeur to the tree, an even deeper dream to enter into, perhaps only once in my lifetime.

The freezing temperatures relented, but only for an hour, so the snow stuck around all day. One of my favorite articles I found in the back issues of The Weekly Messenger—the newspaper that became the Teche News—was a description of snowfall in St. Martinville in 1933, and it’s brief enough to repeat in its entirety here. “A light snow fell here Thursday afternoon, but it melted as it touched the ground.”

I pulled out Uncle Allen’s old photographs from the 1973 snowfall, a few months before I was born. He had taken a photograph of his two older boys and my two older sisters in front of a snowman they had just brought to life in the front yard. You can see patches of green grass around the snowman, as though the children had used up every bit of snow they could find to have enough to build a snowman. That’s the kind of snow we have become familiar with around here. But the 2025 snowfall, not only did the snow not melt as it touched the ground, it stuck around for three whole days.

Thursday, January 23——The first day it was safe to drive I drove out to Bayou Mercier to see how the snow had fallen there. The Catahoula area is crisscrossed by coulées, and they all were still partly frozen two days after the snow. On any other day, you might not notice them as they cut quietly across the landscape and tunnel under the roads through culverts. On Thursday they were downright magical, the dark paths of water, like Scandinavian streams, so visible against the surrounding white snow, cypress knees poking up from the ice and the snow where only nine months earlier copper irises had bloomed.

It was hard to wrap my head around the dwarf palmetto fronds buckling under the snow, and balls of snow tangled up in Spanish moss was a sight I thought I’d never see. The red cedar trees, a native evergreen, seemed to embrace the snow the best. Even as I was photographing the footprints in the snow—raccoon, deer and other mysterious creatures—I knew that nothing would ever be able to capture the feeling of seeing it in person.

*West Atchafalaya Basin Protection Levee*

Friday, January 24——I woke up to see only one tiny pile of snow still left on the ground. No snow on the branches of any live oak. The satsuma was browned, the red banana plant was stunned, but the St. Augustine grass was surprisingly emerald green, and the cabbages were mostly unfazed. The cilantro in the garden was in need of a good haircut, but it looked like it would be bushy again in no time. And I could see that the parsley was already coming up.

Snow Diary

Jude Theriot MD

Snow Diary

Drowned Sunflowers

Jude Theriot MD