Hoping for snow

It's 6 a.m.. Outside our bedroom window the spiked leaves of our yucca tree are perfectly still. Not even a whisper of wind.  Like everyone inside our house, the world outside seems to be waiting. Waiting for snow.
The forecast: by this evening, Chichester should be covered in  10 cm of cold, white powder.
In some countries, 10 cm of snow is nothing.  In England, it is world stopping.  Schools close, roads are impassable, trains stop running and people fear starvation because they might not make it to the supermarket for several days.
The kids are hoping that the first flakes will fall soon.  They still have 3 hours before school starts. Just  time  for enough snow to fall, if it falls fast and furious, for a "snow day," to be declared and for their schools to be closed.
And me-self-declared snow-disliker that I am-I am looking out of the window, hoping anxiously for those first flakes to fall. Not because I want a day off work, although that is always nice, but because, if it snows hard enough, it will stop me from having to do the horrible thing that I have to do today. Today is the day that I have to take our cat, Lucy, to have her tail cut off.
It's strange how people seem to accumulate pets.  Ninesh has always hated them.  He sees them as a burden, a drain on finances and a demand on time and holiday plans.  And although part of me agrees with him, I have rarely been without pets. Even if it is just goldfish! Now, all these years into our marriage, we seem to have added a cat and a tortoise to our collection of fish.
We didn't choose Lucy, she chose us.  She turned up in our kitchen one hot Summer's day when we had only been living in our house a few months.  Our 2 year old daughter screamed the first time she saw her, a living, moving creature in our kitchen.  Her " new-to-the-world," brother sensed his sister's fear and started howling.  So I gathered the cat up and put her firmly back on the street. But cats are tenacious. They don't give up.  Every time I opened a door or a window, every time we went into the garden or chatted to neighbours, there she was.  Until eventually, she joined our family and the children only cried if they couldn't find her.  And their tears always made her come running. She seemed to love the kids and couldn't stand it if they were upset.  Sometimes, when they were looking for her, Mia and Joss would go and stand in the garden and pretend to cry and she would come bounding across gardens and over fences to comfort them.
But I am wondering if today she will wish she had never walked through our kitchen door, black and white tail held high. Because the lump on it, that has been ballooning for months, has grown so big, that we have no choice.  And it is a horrible feeling, this playing god, making life changing decisions for others, pets or humans.  I hold onto the thought that cats don't need tails to lie in front of a fire being stroked or to sleep on the grass in the sunshine.  And I hope that I am doing the right thing.
But even more, I hope for snow. Because if it snows and the world grinds to a halt and the schools and vets surgery are closed , the kids and I will light a fire and let Lucy curl up next to us while we watch rubbish on TV. And all will be well and Lucy will keep her tail for one more day.
Is that the first flake I can see falling through the darkness?