Winter Woes

A new semester brings change. And change is good. I needed new things for my changing life, and so like many others infected with the spirit of change, I made a trip to Target. On Jan. 7, after a thrilling quest for new linens and garbage bags, I left the Target parking lot with a restored sense of possibility.

Emboldened by new-found optimism, I gushed to my friend about how blue the sky looked, how warm the sun felt. Yet as soon as we started the ignition, a black cloud appeared. And by the time we had reached the freeway, we were attacked by a vicious downpour of ice pellets, which freakishly dissipated by the time I reached my downtown Durham destination—a nasty reminder that snow always likes a holiday down South.

No other force of weather can personify evil like snow. It will literally glare at you while you are driving. The creators of Duke’s academic calendar like to trick us by calling this time of year “Spring Semester” and decline to acknowledge that winter exists in Durham, and it is in fact a particularly nasty incarnation because the few snow storms that inevitably result each year always take us by surprise.

I was assaulted by snow a little earlier than most this year, having spent the semester living dangerously close to Viking Country. Dec. 1 rolled around and brought with it an iron curtain of snow. A few days later, as if to mobilize itself for the digital age, snow hacked into the realm of Facebook and Twitter, claiming the statuses of displaced Californians and Floridians with a simple cry of, “SNOW!” Snow then followed me home for the holidays in the form of a swift New York City blizzard. It was an apocalyptic scene of monstrous MTA buses frozen 20 inches deep—in a city where elections are won and lost on snow cleanup.

After a month of having my sanity slowly chipped away by the grueling spell of snow, I brought a small, stylish convertible down to Durham, only to have my outspoken optimism shattered on Jan. 10 by DukeAlert and the busy signal of Durham Cab Co.

Call me an ice queen, but I’ve lost my rose-tinted glasses—the Gothic Wonderland is no snow globe.