I was just standing on my front porch in the warm sunlight, watching the snow turn to hail.

It has been that kind of week in Seattle. Peter Donnelly, the grand poobah of the Seattle arts community, once said to me that the reality of this city's weather is that there is no weather. By that he meant there are few extremes. Cloudy and 50 degrees is the usual weather report in this town -- no deep snows, no scorching heat, no hurricanes or twisters or droughts.

Well, this April, we've gotten weather. April showers have brought more than May flowers. As the tulips have blossomed, temperatures have dropped toward freezing. There has been such a dumping of snow in the mountains that some ski areas have chosen to stay open indefinitely. Saturday night, I was at a Passover dinner with a couple of women who had been skiing earlier in the day in fresh powder. I went through sunshine, rain and an attack of pelting hail on my 20-minute drive to the gathering. Sitting at the Seder table and hearing about the visitation of 10 plagues on ancient Egypt, I glanced out the window to see if frogs might be falling from the sky. Had amphibians been thumping to the ground, I would have been only mildly surprised.

This orgy of goofy weather followed the one-day, summer-like meteorological orgasm of last weekend and it has gotten a little confusing. A couple of days ago, my wife was parking her Miata in what she took to be a sudden snow flurry. When she got out of the car, she realized the white stuff was not snow, it was blossoms falling from the cherry trees.

Weather has come to Seattle. The frogs can't be far behind.