Early winter blast chills Big Easy; lemonade, anyone?

I saw a slight twinkle of frost on our New Orleans housetop this morning. Fortunately that’s as close as it has been during these last few days which last Friday brought snow from Jackson south to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.
The swath of wintry precipitation stretched from south Texas to who-knows-where along the northeast coast and came as a first-time snow surprise for many along its southern reaches. The weather forecast caused me to postpone my Friday return from Batesville to New Orleans until Saturday when I found myself driving south over a clear I-55 but through a winter wonderland on all sides from Jackson south to Manchac.
My wife said that the precipitation in the city itself was limited to rain but lots of it. Once when she went on our back porch she encountered a sheet of ice on the steps, but rain returned and soon washed it away.
Passing southbound and non-stop through Hammond I had no idea of the extent of power outages that impacted that area along the Northshore to Baton Rouge. Power crews on Monday were still working to get power restored to hundreds, down from tens of thousands in the immediate aftermath. It was heavy wet snow that stuck to tree limbs until the limbs became so heavy they broke and crashed down through power lines below.
If you remember the Ice Storm of 1994, you will recall the disdain for pine trees that many of us carried forward from that epochal weather event. Snow and ice adhere in abundance to the limbs of those evergreens, and there are a lot of pine trees along Lake Pontchartrain’s north shore.
The temperatures during the last few nights have singed some flowers and shrubs in our yard, sparing others. Tender plants like coleus are vulnerable; the various varieties of hibiscus have not been very much impacted. In the backyard, the two angel trumpets that have grown into small trees since last winter’s one night of killing frost, appear to have survived with buds still maturing toward blooms.
The lemon tree is still full of lemons waiting for harvest. I’m not sure when that harvest should come, but we’ve been pulling lemons as needed for many weeks. They have been juicy and delicious.
Damncats are hungrier and spend considerable time atop the heating ducts under our house. At night can hear the metal of the duct walls flexing under their weight.
Occasionally, and less frequently as the years have flown by, I crawl under there to see if any ducts have been crushed flat enough to prevent the flow or air through them.
So far none have been mashed flat. Warm air reaches all registers during winter; cool air during summer.
Beautiful, clear days followed last week’s weather downtown, but before mid-December this area has already seen what would usually consider winter’s worst.
What will we see in January?