Every morning when I wake up, I ask myself the same question: why did I go to school in Pennsylvania? Why didn’t I flock to Florida? U-Miami? Palm Beach Atlantic University, anything!
Mind you, I’m from Pennsylvania. I’ve lived and grown through a true, keystone state winter for 21 horrible, miserably freezing years. It’s like a modern Ice Age every October to April. Once, during my winter track season in high school, our coach sent us on a forty-minute tempo run. We warned him that a snow squall was rolling in fast, but he insisted it was fine. As if the weatherman would lie to us, wouldn’t you know, twenty minutes in, my team and I got separated by a tornado of snowflakes. My friend Paul got the worst of it— he became disoriented and ran to the wrong school. I survived that day knowing that that would be the coldest of colds I would ever endure in my entire life.
And then I lived through a Bucknell winter and was shamefully proven wrong.
When I walk to class in the morning, I’m repeatedly struck with sympathy for those who endured the freezing temperatures on the night the Titanic sank. A couple of days ago, when I was walking to class, my water spilled onto my hand. It seeped through my glove, but it wasn’t a big deal; I wiped it on my pants and continued up the hill by the KLARC.
By the time I got to Dana, it looked like I was a victim of moderate to severe frostbite. Upon reflection, I think I was.
Ever since the snowstorm two weeks ago, Bucknell has been pretty in sight and pretty awful in experience. The roads are icy, the sidewalks are a safety hazard and I’ve been trekking salt everywhere I go. Don’t get me wrong, I love looking out my apartment window in the morning and admiring my snowy surroundings. I actually find a great deal of joy bundling up in a thick sweater, jeans and boots. But in order to make it to my class, which is about ten minutes away, I have to add a scarf, hat, gloves, mittens over my gloves, two pairs of socks, earmuffs over my hat and two jackets at a minimum. If I’m walking a distance that exceeds that time stamp, take everything I just said and multiply it by two.
Furthermore, I have naturally curly hair that sits like a perfectly horrendous mop. Some pieces are coiled, some are stick straight and some just stick straight up— to avoid feeling absolutely crazy, I spend a solid amount of time each morning pressing everything into place with a heating iron and a dream. Usually, this does the trick. And usually, this trick is undone when a mountain of snow rolls off the roof of the ELC and hits me square on the head, a head that’s already covered with a hood, hat and earmuffs. There’s been a brush and a bottle of hairspray in my bag since the first Christmas carol played on the radio.
However, the absolute worst part about winter just might be when those Christmas carols stop playing. The chants of eggnog, holiday cheer and happiness dissipate on Jan. 1 just in time for the start of the new semester. The only thing we have to look forward to is a 140-year-old groundhog that lets us down every year by seeing his stupid shadow. When I go outside, I’m cold. When I go inside, I’m cold. When I sit in class, I’m cold. When I sit in the Bison, I’m cold. So I think I speak for everyone when I say experiencing a Pennsylvania winter while away at college may truly be the tenth circle of Dante’s Inferno. And when the weather finally does break and the sun comes out, it happens two days before graduation. The “spring” in spring semester is really just friends we made along the way, but they don’t want you to know that.