The Colby Echo

Issue date: 3/9/07 Section: Opinions

At the time of this writing, there is snow on the ground.
I say this because the snow is beginning to melt a bit. It's March and I know it's still winter, but the snow is beginning to feel tentative. The temperatures still hit below freezing yesterday, and there is still the need to put on a warm jacket before venturing outside, but there is something that feels different now.

I'm not convinced that what has changed is the weather, though. I've experienced winter before-though never in Maine-and I am not sure why this season is different. Perhaps it is because Maine is seen as this cold, desolate place by some outside of the state; surviving and enjoying the winter makes me a tough or rugged person. And I did have to bundle up quite a bit on a few memorable days. I distinctly recall my scarf wrapped up to my eyes, hat pulled down past eyebrows, all the while leaning against the wind.

This experience happened quite suddenly to me. A group of friends and I were walking back from some get-together over JanPlan break and it began to snow. Colby no longer was this somewhat dead area of students trying to forget that in a few days they would be back in class-it became some unfamiliar place that was meant to be celebrated. I know I won't forget that snow, even when it becomes finally warm enough to strip off the scarves and sweaters.

With the few downpours of winter we received these past few months, I was able to experience, again, the indescribable beauty of a world swallowed in white. Has it been described countless times in poetry, prose, and over the telephone to friends and family hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles away? Yes. But there is still the awe-filling beauty of opening the door and being confronted with a monochromatic world, all noise absorbed by the falling powder.

There is something in this ethereal beauty that makes us act nearly jubilant about the whole event of a snowfall. We willingly freeze our ears and toes just to be part of a collective whole of winter.

This is why, when I went running the other day, and my running partner and I complained of the wind and the cold and how we live in Siberia, we kept going, our legs beginning to freeze, as we took in winter at its utmost.

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