It is not snowing in Grand Saline

Every April first, my Memaw would call to tell me it was coming down hard where she was. The first year I was in Canton, fifteen minutes up the road, and I went outside to look.

Then Dublin. Then Livingston. Then Houston, then Livingston again, then Canton again, then Grand Saline, then Hideaway, then Livingston, where I am now. Thirty-odd years and most of the width of Texas, and every April first the phone rang and it was snowing in Grand Saline.

She was calling from a town sitting on top of a salt dome. A mountain of white crystal under her feet, and she would ring me up to report snow. I do not know for certain that she ever thought about that. I choose to believe she did.

For a couple of those years I lived in Grand Saline myself. It was not snowing.

The mud pies

The other one she got me with was the pies. She could actually bake — hot rolls and cinnamon rolls were what people knew her for, but there was also a German chocolate cake, a three-layer chocolate with white icing, and a pecan pie I would still drive for.

One year she told me she had made me some mud pies. I did not open the box until I got home.

They were mud pies.

That was her whole method, and it is the reason this site is a decent place to keep her: plausible setup, delivered completely straight, and a reveal she made you wait for. She never said "I'm kidding." She let you drive home.

So once a year it snows here instead

On the first of April the front page of this site snows, wherever in the world you are reading it from, because that was the point — I moved and the call came anyway. There is a button in the corner that says It’s not snowing, and pressing it is how you win. A bakery that does not exist turns up in the directory for the day, with her real menu on it and one lie.

What the joke does not touch

People check this site for a burn ban before they light a brush pile, and for a flood warning at two in the morning. So none of the above goes anywhere near a fact.

On April first the weather on this site is still the National Weather Service’s weather, the lake level is still the gauge’s reading, the burn ban is still the county’s burn ban, and the meetings, the scanner page and every emergency page are exactly what they are on any other day of the year. The snow is decoration and it says so. If there is a warning out that morning it does not fall at all, and if one arrives while you are reading, it stops.

Which is, when you think about it, the same joke she was telling. Nothing she said was ever true, and she never once claimed it was.

For Memaw, who called every April first to say it was snowing.