Snowy surprises all across LI, including in CD3

After an absence of two years, Long Island finally got some snow.

The storm on Tuesday morning — the region's first significant wintry mix in a long time — produced a gallery of gorgeous scenery and a range of emotions. For children, it was a wonderful surprise. The youngest among us had no frame of reference for their frolics, having never seen the stuff here before. Even older kids could be forgiven if the idea of making a snowman on the front lawn, or throwing snowballs from a snow fort, seemed like something out of a dream.

In this era of warming temperatures, snow may have seemed like some ancient phenomenon they’d read about in a book. But it rekindled something in some of our more entrepreneurially minded youngsters, sending them into the streets, shovels in hand, traipsing door-to-door looking for customers.

For adults, the white stuff momentarily stopped us in our tracks, something go-go Long Islanders with their expressway mentality absolutely despise. We don't like hitting the brakes on the daily flow of life. But the snow also revealed a facet of our post-pandemic, climate change lives: Where many of us once would shrug and figure out how we were going to get to work, now we look out the window and ask whether we really have to go. We have become — dare we say it — snowflakes.

Still, it was clear how Tuesday’s storm underlined the serendipity of life. The few who received an unintended, unscheduled break — from school or from work — enjoyed it. But the snow created more weighty problems in some places — like the Third Congressional District where voters were casting ballots in a hotly contested special election being watched around the nation as a potential bellwether for this fall's contests.

Tuesday’s storm, which didn't last long into the day, became a wild card for turnout in the race between Democrat Tom Suozzi and Republican Mazi Melesa Pilip. The incongruity of snow somehow seemed appropriate, a sort of final indignity caused by George Santos, whose own snow job on voters of the Nassau -Queens district got him expelled from Congress, requiring this special election to finish out his term. Weather unicorn, meet political unicorn. Analysts will no doubt parse the numbers, but we may never know fully how the weather affected the willingness of potential voters to get to the polls.

The snow recalled an ​​old Yiddish saying, “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht,” which roughly means, “Man Plans, and God Laughs.” The ageless aphorism should lead to a modern bit of wisdom: Early voting before Election Day is a sensible way to avoid the vagaries of nature. The snow was wonderful, but it was also a humbling reminder of how fate, like the weather, can suddenly change.