First Snow at LU

I have always felt like you need to go through all four seasons in a place before you really know it. When we moved to campus Braydon and I promised each other that we’d see our family through all four seasons before we made any firm proclamations about what we thought of this new life of ours. So, the snow seemed especially pronounced when it came for the first time this week.

The campus was beautiful, especially up here on the hill where we live. It was a bright white snow that stuck to the trees. Even the deer, that we see in the woods almost daily, seemed more breathtaking in the crisp white of it.

We don’t need to have the driveway plowed; we don’t need to shovel our paths; or lay down salt; or worry about a thing where our home is concerned. It is all done for us. By a budget that is not ours, and by people we so deeply appreciate. A year ago I couldn’t even imagine what it would feel like to have those burdens lifted. Now I just relish the relief of it.

But the most profound difference with this snow — compared to all the others in the past eight years — was that I could easily and seamlessly take a chunk of time away from my office/work/day to play in the snow with my child. I’ve forced myself in the past. But this time was different: it wasn’t forced. It felt easy and light. I was, after-all, right here.

When home is work and work is home it can sometimes feel like it is all work. But sometimes (lucky for me, it is often), it is actually the opposite– and it feels like all play.

Students at Sayre saw us playing. They walked past us on the pathways and they looked out their dorm room windows. I wondered what they were thinking as I watched them watch us, them trying to hide smiles, but with smiles creeping across their faces nonetheless. Here, at one of the biggest crunch times of the year, smack in the middle of the 2nd to last week of classes, when the pressure cooker is blasting on ‘high’ and we’re a week away from finals and the tension in the air of campus is so thick you could slice it with a knife… here, amidst all the stress and angst and aggravation… here, amidst the self-doubt and insecurity and desperation to prove ourselves… here, on campus, during the first snow, is a tenured professor building snowmen and making snow angels with her four-year-old sprightly daughter.

You couldn’t miss us in the lawn of Sayre– Meera with her pink snowsuit and shrill shrieking laughter as she ran in the snow-covered lawn and called out to students, with clumps of snow in her mittens, “You should taste this! It’s delicious!!!” I wondered then, and I wonder now, what those kids all thought, and felt.

We invited some of them to play with us, but most of them declined, unthinkingly, quickly saying, “I can’t! I have to study!” Meera knows they have to study. She hears it all the time. So she’d run off smiling, totally unaffected. “You know?” I’d call out, “You can learn so much more from this four year old than you ever could from those books in your backpack!” And they’d smile or chuckle and wave back at me as they shuffled off to the library to study.