As a senior at Colgate, I am more than well acquainted with the snow. I look back on my junior, sophomore, and first year experiences and remember walking home down Willow Path even around Halloween time feeling like I was in a snowglobe. At this time during my sophomore year, Colgate had to cancel class for the first time since 1993 due to a huge snow storm that displaced students as they were trying to return to school. I remember trying to fight my way up winding highways in the blizzard and watching cars slip off the road as I approached school. When the email blast came out that class was canceled, I strapped on my snow boots, headed to my friend’s townhouse, drank hot chocolate and built a snowman. However, this year, even as December rolls around, I haven’t so much as looked at my snow boots. 

Growing up on Long Island, I held a similar opinion to most East Coast residents: the first big snow can be exciting; however, it is just an indicator of the shoveling, salting of the driveways, navigation of icy paths up the hill (specifically the hill going down to Persson Hall) and sludge-y roads to come. There is nothing I dreaded more than waking up 15 minutes earlier before class to defrost my car. Despite all of this, I secretly liked to brag to my friends at southern schools about how early it would snow, how consistently our campus was covered in ice, and tell them stories of falling on black ice in front of tour groups. Colgate students all seem to rally around the uncomfortable yet beautiful conditions the snow offered us. 

As I am completing my first semester of senior year, I am increasingly saddened by the absence of snow that typically adds to the community of this campus. I find myself constantly checking the weather app waiting for an “extreme conditions” warning so my friends and I can put on a holiday movie and watch the snow fall from my house on College Street. It doesn’t feel like a true Colgate winter without the snow. 

I have been warned by recent graduates that there is a period of time that you need in order to adjust to post-grad-life, and a kind of sadness at the closing of a chapter and the intrusion of the real world. Although I have been a legal adult for quite some time now and am so excited for what my future will hold after Colgate, graduating seems to indicate, for me, the true beginning of adulthood. COVID-19 has taken so much of the normal Colgate experience away from us all in college during this time, and few things stayed constant. I realize now that regardless of the newest strain, CDC report, positive or negative test and masks, the slow fall of snow on this campus has stayed untouched and beautifully picturesque. My displaced anxiety about the absence of snowfall seems to be representative of the beginning of my unique end at Colgate University. So to all the seniors out there, and everyone else missing the normal Hamilton weather: I really hope we get a classic Colgate snow soon.