In fact, it last snowed here on January 25th 2013. That's two years without any snow at all - not a single flocon.
To my mind, this is a rareity. Although it is really difficult to discover what the longest snow free period is, we have been told that last year was the first time in 30 years it didn't snow in Paris, and when we bought our house we were told it snows every year even if it doesn't settle.
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I lived in Paris for several years in the 1970s and until 1982. I remember snow maybe two or three times in all those years. Of course, there were also years when I was back in the states during that time. I remember snow in March in 1970, but it didn't really stick. I remember snow in Paris maybe once in the winters of 1974-75 and '75-'76. We had a really cold snap in Paris in Dec.-Jan 1978, with a lot of ice and some snow. The pipes in my top floor apartment near Les Halles froze solid! I was without water for several days, but the pipes didn't burst. I also remember people older than me saying that in the 1970s it just didn't snow in Paris the way it did back in the 1950s and 1960s.
No snow here either, but yesterday morning we had what is called a "wintry mix" in the U.S., meaning a cold rain with a few snowflakes in it. Everything is pretty much frozen over this morning, with a heavy frost.
So you leaving resulted in it snowing every year in Paris?! I don't think the snow stuck or hung around very long most years in that 30 year period. The weather yesterday was foul in the morning, with icy rain, but quite nice in the afternoon here and in Richelieu which is where we were. Today heavy frost and brilliant sunshine.
Walt says he remembers snow in January or February 1982 in Paris. He said it didn't really stick on the pavements and roadways. I don't even remember that, but I was there then too.
Back in those days, I lived in Illinois, about 150 miles south of Chicago. Snow! We had frequent blizzards, with snowfall of 30, 40, or even 60 cm several times a year. Some years, the temperature went two or three months without going above freezing. And the winds over the prairie, coming down from Canada, were frigid and fierce.
Oh, and sometime in the early to mid-1980s there was a cold snap here in the Cher Valley that was memorable. One grape-grower neighbor of ours says all the tree trunks froze solid that year, making it impossible to go out and cut firewood. The woman we bought our house from said that around that time the cherry-laurel hedge around our property froze all the way down to the ground. They had to cut off the dead limbs and branches and wait for it to grow back from the roots.
Our neighbour Edouard told us about a period in the early-mid 80s that was really cold, and in the 1950s. Crops failed and the temperature never went above 0 for a couple of weeks in early February I think. A couple of years ago the laurel hedges at the sewage works in Preuilly had to be cut back to the ground after a hard winter. You'd never know to look at them now.
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