Snow Days
The first week of classes in January was met with a very sincere delay. I remember this fondly because of how everything came along. Within the weekend of my arrival, temperatures dropped, and in the following days, snowstorms ensued. I have become unaccustomed to snow storms since my childhood back when they were very common. So to have my first days at Arcadia accentuated by snowfall was a nice thing.
The encroachment of snow led to the transition to virtual classes, and for that, it was a very slow and calm set of days. My first day of classes was nearly all canceled due to the awkwardness of the first day being virtual. The whole campus felt under a lull, through the reclusive nature of students staying in their dorms and everywhere else that is warm. When I made the expedition to the chat, I trekked through snow covered paths, and all the while I felt a distinct sensation of relaxation through the crunches of snow beneath my runners. Admittedly, I was and still am very ill equipped to venture into the snow, I have no boots or ski pants and such. Nonetheless, I found that my passage across the snow was a highlight of my first few days on campus.
Flakes decorated my hat white and piled in thin layers across my clothes. Of course, these decorations would all dissolve into dampness when I entered the Chat and it would only return to decorate my clothes when I left. I ordered what I believe is the Chat’s most consistent meal: chicken fingers. I watched the snowfall for some time during that dinner, reminded of how I used to feel as a child looking out the lodge windows on my father’s ski trips. Similarly, in the Chat, I watched while snowfall covered the green to a stable white sheet. This feeling and image were ironically not categorized within the confines of nostalgia. Rather I devised a perfect term for how I could describe the feeling across campus, “College-Core”. The whole sentiment of this term was based on the speculation that anything can happen at college. So the whole snow days, the more relaxed nature of everything, forwarded a chaotic schedule–something that we all related to just being college stuff. Snowfall became a crucial image of our current college lives, and for that, we were happier.
Through days where it kept snowing, or even those where it was cold enough not to melt–we began classes again. For my friends and me, our walks across the campus grounds were shortened for brevity, and also a sense of discomfort in the chill. Yet our walks became seemingly more meaningful in that weather, where in between classes we stomped and threw ice to pieces just to see it shatter–it was like when we were kids again. Then going to class and looking at the blanketed environments thick with ice and snow. There was a hopeful sense of getting out of class, and a motivation to get out.
These days were more nostalgic for me in the sense that they reminded me distinctly of the winters I saw as a kid. Where snow and ice encompassed everything, and where going out was something far less mundane than normal travel. Feeling an exhilaration from the cold and everything with it, making those moments inside feel far better. One night I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to go work on my ceramics. During my walk across campus, I looked at the snowfall in the darkness, illuminated by streetlights, I even stopped to look upwards at the flurry. I remembered the vivid feeling of awe that I felt as a kid, the same feeling that I felt when I laid in the snow and simply gazed out. These feelings never truly left me, they remained constant through the whole storm.
After the storms ended and the snow began to melt, this nostalgia faded away. I had moved out of my old dorm, and I’m now living in a new one. With the end of the storm, there was a beginning to a whole chapter of new possibilities. For all that lost nostalgia, I had felt a replacement through newfound drive and ambition. I didn’t lament the loss of the snow, and the calmness setting across campus. Though rather I was simply happy it ever happened, for the time being, I was solely content on moving forward–and eventually, there would be another storm.
