It's Snowing in Baghdad!

This morning, my family and I had a jubilant e-mail from my brother that it was snowing in Baghdad! He was excited to see some signs of home, I think.

(In case you don't know, my brother is in Iraq until late spring, working with the Iraqis to help set up a judicial system. He's a Navy JAG working directly with counterparts in Iraq.)

Here's an excerpt from an article on yahoo news:

After weathering nearly five years of war, Baghdad residents thought they'd pretty much seen it all. But Friday morning, as muezzins were calling the faithful to prayer, the people here awoke to something certifiably new.

For the first time in memory, snow fell across Baghdad.

Although the white flakes quickly dissolved into gray puddles, they brought an emotion rarely expressed in this desert capital snarled by army checkpoints, divided by concrete walls and ravaged by sectarian killings — delight.

For a couple of hours anyway, a city where mortar shells routinely zoom across to the Green Zone became united as one big White Zone. As of late afternoon, there were no reports of violence. The snow showed no favoritism as it fell faintly on neighborhoods Shiite and Sunni alike, and (with apologies to James Joyce) upon all the living and the dead.