White Winter Hymnal

Hurricane Sandy, blizzard Nemo, and so on. Each day like that meant prolonged time to finish school work, catch up on sleep, recharge some mental energy and chat with friends over a card game. Each day was unique. The disturbance in daily routine lead to trying something new, adventuring in the snow, taking up a new skill. Sometimes the point was just to stay in bed all day and not feel guilty because bad weather didn’t permit doing anything else. One day – a memory defining the season of the year.

This semester was different. I should have assumed that when I was coming back from winter break. Transit from Brno to Boston took twelve hours and the worst part was the final ten minutes. I was walking home from a train station, minus eighteen degrees Celsius, stabbing wind pain. Icicles formed in my beard. The following week we were supposed to get hit by the blizzard Juno. After receiving tens of warning emails I started taking the situation seriously and went grocery shopping to create some sort of survival stash. It turned out that I started taking the situation seriously too late. There was not a single piece of bread in the supermarket. No ham, no cheese, zero eggs. I picked up the remaining edible leftovers, mostly with no nutritional value, and two gallons of water just in case our pipes froze. Then the storm came. Parking ban, travelling ban, two feet of snow on the unplowed roads, the only open store was the one owned by an Arab living close by. After two days of just listening to old records with my roommate, isolated in our apartment in Allston, we concluded that this year we’d be getting more days off.

The storm ended and a new one came, one named Neptune. Then Superbowl, more days off, storm Linus. I got lost in the names of storms. During eighteen days we got 77 inches of snow. So far the third snowiest winter in Boston since 1893. Boston exceeded its snow removal budget and had to borrow snowmelters from New York. The city is full of trucks carrying tons of snow. I was wondering what was happening with such material but then I came across a gigantic snow mountain on the edge of Cambridge, seeing trucks adding more and more snow to it. I imagine there would be hundreds of such mountains around the city.

Misery. It was hard getting used to non-functional public transportation. To get to school or work I have to walk forty minutes. The plows just dump all the snow from the roads on the sidewalks and those ceased to exists. Drivers get mad at people walking in the streets but there is simply no other option. Everything is covered with a thick layer of ice and everything is extremely slippery. On top of all that, temperatures deep below zero and more of the stabbing wind pain. At least the campus situation is a little better. The army helped to clean. And I am here just waiting for the apocalypse that will come when all the white stuff melts.

Next to our front door there is ten foot tall icicle thick as a pine tree.