My First Winter

I have seen snow multiple times, but I have never lived amongst it. With only a little more than two weeks of winter experience, I've experienced an array of emotions.

First, it was magical. After hours of studying, I walked out of my room and discovered my campus, already full of an island's worth of misfit toys, transformed into a snow globe version of Antarctica: snow falling, white light, and a bunch of twenty somethings sliding down a hill to get free french toast.

Then I return Sunday, and it looks like Colorado after a heavy blizzard. Piles of snow line the walls. I'm told I will freeze. "You will die," everyone said, but it feels warmer than fall. It feels like a Steamboat winter, where it feels warmer than a thermometer says it is. I recognize a familiar scent, the indescribable smell of snow, evoking my memories of happy times like the ones where Nana pushed me down a hill.

Until today, when ice cold rain fell from the sky, I thought it matched the idealistic version of a snow globe imitating Bahamas. It seemed fantastical. Then, as Lauryn Hill said, I got reality, what people need. I felt cold. The snow became ice. I nearly slipped. But it's new. Times goes past slower, giving my hectic life space, allowing me, a workaholic always looking ahead, to wallow in the joyful present. When piles of snow line my walls, winter seems never ending. Happiness becomes a way of being, not a passing mood, giving people hope that happiness will never end.