Michelle So writes a bi-weekly column on campus nature and its absurdities.
Inclement weather in the last month allowed me to serendipitously erase classes and commitments from my otherwise Tetris-like calendar. White out (clean calendar) after white out (blizzard) washed over southern Connecticut in waves. Badly plowed snow waxed and waned from stacks into carpet into mud. I thought I knew waves — the oil-tainted beaches of Santa Monica with frothy streaks that came inland in hordes. We could not tell if it was sea foam or bacterial bloom or a petroleum-encased combination of the former.
I did not know waves like I do now. I thought they were mere moon tides until I rode them in the coming of snow. The great celestial sinusoidal harmonia that carried me back to my youth. The waves of joy at first snowfall and the purest elation at its silence. I felt like a child. I sang snow songs, alone, and I sang hymns to the snow plows. The waves of a winter and a deep melancholy, more midnight than the moon. I thought I heard crying but it was only the wind. The fleeting first flake made me feel so alive. Then, it, too, died.
I know this snow gives the deniers firewood. I’m scared it will burn. I’m scared the time has frozen in lapping waves of ice and foam and froth and dirt. I am scared. But I know this: my skin is warm and pink and snowflakes melt when I touch them. Someone hand me a surfboard so that I may coast this moss melt into tomorrow.
