Snow (for a non-homeowner)

There are two types of California natives living in New England. The first type wears sandals and shorts at all cost, complains about the lack of good Mexican food here, and starts lots of sentences with "If I were in California right now..." whenever it starts to snow. The second type dresses sensibly, complains about the lack of good Mexican food here, and starts lots of sentences with "This is so fucking cool" when it starts to snow. I'm in the latter category.

When I was growing up in California, snow was a chilly, cotton ball backdrop for dreams and dream vacations, not a reality. For one weekend a year, I sledded and froze to my heart's content on a Cub Scouts trip to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, but otherwise I had to settle for reading Snowy Day and watching Frosty the Snowman on repeat during Christmas season.

Now I'm in Massachusetts, and things are awesome. I'm in my room, the place where I live, where my own bed is, not being on vacation or watching movies or reading pictures books or anything, and the world is fucking white outside. I love it, and if my love is naive, simple, and overly innocent, it is a love marked by the same purity that characterizes freshly fallen snow.

See, I live in a dormitory. I don't own a car. In fact, almost everything that I own is in this room with me, safe from the snow, and one of those things is a warm jacket. The walkways I use to get to class are maintained by a round-the-clock crew of salters and plowers, and I never half to walk more than half a mile anyway. The dining hall keeps turning out a dependable, squash-heavy menu regardless of the weather, and my heater works most of the time. My fellow DeWolfePack members are in the same boat, and it's probably fair to say that all of these conditions are Things which we Like.

Not having to shovel snow is nice, and that fortunate privilege, plus my own relative lack of experience with snow, has allowed it to become one of my absolute favorite things about living in New England. Here, without a single original thought, is why.

Life is boring and often kind of sucky. I, along with my fellow students, my professors, my parents, my parents' colleagues, and everyone else, get up in the morning and do the same stuff that I usually do. A lot of it is work. A lot of it is repetitive. Then I go to bed, wake up, and do it again. I get sick of the monotony, weary of the constant pressure, and tired of the struggles that, at their conclusion, produce more struggle. Very often I need, to borrow a phrase from the cesspool of banality in which I paddle, a change of scenery. Vacations are nice, but they're only a momentary evasion of the tasks, responsibilities, and pressures that I need to address. They're a break from life, as opposed to a change in life. Besides, they're always too short.

Snow does what the most carefully planned spiritual retreat or longest globe-trotting sabbatical cannot: it changes life. We sense the change before it occurs, as the temperature in our tired environment grows colder, then warmer again. We trudge along past the people we're tired of seeing and the buildings we're tired of living and working in, but something has started to feel different: anticipation, as if the world is holding its breath. People become animated and business becomes hurried even as the world seems to slow to a crawl - better get this done before the weather sets in, don't want to be caught outside in the storm.

Then it begins to snow. If we're lucky, we notice the first flakes as they fall, the movie flakes that mean something wonderful. When the snow picks up, everyone heads inside. Maybe we don't want to ruin our coats, or maybe we're subconsciously expressing reverence for whoever is making this happen. But we return to our offices and classrooms and homes and dorm rooms and turn on the lights and turn up the heat, casting furtive glances out the window to check the progress of the storm. We tell each other it's still snowing in half-whispers, prompting more brief looks out the windows.

Finally, it stops snowing. It might be 3am or 2pm or any other time, but if we're awake, we head outside to find the change of scenery we have longed for. The world, coated in white and restarting after its pause, is new again (naive and innocent, no?). The buildings, the vegetation, the ground itself are all remade by their new covering. The terrain is different, so we wear boots and keep our eyes mostly straight down in front of us. But when we look up, the views are spectacularly beautiful, especially considering our discontent with the same place just hours before. Tree branches, previously unnoticed, are now individually capped with stripes of bright white. Lampposts, an empty songwriter cliche earlier in the day, suddenly warrant a few of their frequent mentions. Our reality has changed to accomodate this new, cold thing that covers everything and refuses to be disposed of easily. We have no choice but to adapt - something new to do.

This makes people more interesting too. The same coworkers and friends and family we could barely stand to speak to in the Old World are now engaged in the same struggle to adapt that occupies us. Furthermore, that excitement we feel as we step outside - they're feeling that too. For a brief moment, entire communities share a collective thought about the weather. For a brief moment, entire communities are united.

Plus, we act ridiculous in the snow. Snowball fights, like nursing young avoiding fire, seem to be engrained in the human psyche as a basic survival instinct. If there is snow, we must act like children. We just must. And it is fun. We like fun.

Of course, the snow doesn't stay white and new forever. It melts, and the ends of our sidewalks disintegrate into slush pools six inches deep as we try to avoid the incessant dripping of tree branches and overhangs. Even before the melt, we people do our best to ruin the snow, trampling it with boots and bicycles and soaking it in exhaust fumes. Before long, the New World of snow becomes old and perhaps even more insufferable than the world we left behind. Once again, we resume our routines and reclaim responsibilities and get tired of everything.

Maybe it's proof that there's some benevolent force out there, then, that for several months of the year, we get second chance after second chance. We take our new toy, break it, and get bored with it, but we can always hope for another snow to send us back inside, stealing glances out the window, as the world makes itself new for us once more.

I might be accurate with all the making-new, but then again, maybe the key here is that I don't have to shovel.