For the longest time, the snow wouldn't melt, and we were all slipping around on ice-encrusted mounds of it. Half the sidewalks remained unshoveled for weeks, and the other half were mosaics of different colors of ice melt. There wasn’t a whole lot to do since any amount of time spent outside felt treacherous and unpleasant, so I took to spending as much of my time as I could inside.
As a kid I waited in anticipation for snow days, all through October and November. When we finally got one, I’d wake up early and rush to bundle up. Waddling like penguins, the neighborhood kids would drag their old toboggans to the steepest hill in our vicinity and split the day between sledding, building snow forts, eating snow and drinking hot chocolate. Now I was armed with a list of gripes I could no longer ignore (my feet were always wet, my skin always dry, no one looks good when they’re trying to avoid black ice, etc.).
I suppose that list of gripes is what makes our current propensity to Zoom so exciting for schools and workplaces. Now, from the comfort of your home, you can do all the work you were originally going to while the ice freezes outside. Instead of having to wake up early to shovel the driveway or add school days onto the end of the year to make up for lost time, you can sit muted in a blurred background while someone says something that was probably important but didn’t grab your attention as much as the arrival of your roommate or the cupcake you just remembered was in your fridge.
On the first day of the snow, a Sunday, Mount Vernon Square was full of people, young and old, enjoying the snow. Some were walking in it, some taking pictures. A few were trying to sled down the street in a flattened cardboard box. On Peabody's campus, the dining hall staff were challenging passing students to snowball fights, and students were bundling up to go see the snow. In two pairs of pants, a group of us found ourselves after about an hour of wading through snow drifts, at the Inner Harbor. One friend barrel-rolled down Federal Hill. The next day, though, all that remained were footprints on footprints. We all had virtual events and asynchronous work to entertain us. The snow was just a nuisance that kept us from taking classes in a meaningful way.
All this made me think about the way kids live now. I don’t have any elementary schoolers in my life, so I don’t know the state of snow days at the moment. I remember in high school that we all got a single snow day each year before Zoom school won out. I hope that kids today still get to experience what I did, even with the possibility of Zoom school looming over them. I hope they spend hours patting soft snow into icy “speed bumps” on a sledding hill and making ice sculptures on the street. I hope that even though we have the technology to keep them from missing a day of school, they still know what it's like to wake up early, check the county website and fall asleep happily for a few more hours, knowing that a long day of fun awaits them. To raise this younger generation to see snow only as a source of wet socks and chapped faces would be something of a tragedy.
Amelia Taylor is a sophomore from Potomac, Md. studying Writing Seminars and Voice Performance. In her column, she draws insights from seemingly random experiences that present themselves in the course of ordinary life.
