While New England has already seen a raging blizzard earlier this year, it was not until last Thursday that DePauw students saw the first snow.
For many people, snow was not something very special to remember (except that it signalled the return of winter and the day when people take off their clothes and run straight to East College). But with only one year of college experience, I still found myself excitedly running to the window to pull up the blinds and watch the snow fall.
There is no snow where I am from.
I saw snow on TV, heard about it from people lucky enough to have really seen it and knew what snow was. But I did not know what it was like.
At that time, the only thing similar to snow that I had ever encountered might be the white scene of the heavy tropical rain falling on everything as if the snow was falling before my eyes.
But if it were snow, I would not need an umbrella. Just like that, I grew up curious about how it felt to touch those small and white flakes, how it would be like to walk in the "rain" of those soft and small pieces of ice. It took me 19 years to have the answers.
My first snow experience was last year's Thanksgiving. I was about to walk to Hogate Hall to have dinner with my friends one evening. Coming out of the side door of Humbert, I could feel something soft and white flying slowly in the frigid air.
You had to be there to see how surprised I was.
Everything around me was dark and I could see the small snowflakes floating all over the air and landing on my hands.
It was like magic.
At that exact moment, a bizarre thought suddenly crossed my mind: There would have been a crowd around the boulder if it had not been Thanksgiving.
But my snowy winter would not have been so awesome without some memorable events — and by memorable events, I mean the ice days during last year's spring semester. After some heavy rain, the low temperature froze everything. Roads, sidewalks and trees were covered by layers of ice and snow. It was almost impossible to go from South Quad to the Hub without slipping or falling one or two times. DePauw was closed for two days.
Although classes were cancelled and the weather was extremely bad, students actually had a lot of fun playing with ice and getting a short extra break before the new semester started. I even ran out of Humbert Hall and skated on the slippery sidewalk.
Before that day, the only ice I had ever touched was from the refrigerator. I had never seen that much ice in my life.
Thanks to the ice and snow, I had the best winter of my life.
—Nguyen is a sophomore economics major from Hanoi, Vietnam.
opinion@thedepauw.com