COLUMN: Snowflakes are made of magic
I love snow.
Not for its school-canceling potential, but because every time a new layer falls there is another chance to invent an entirely new world from the most mundane moments.
Wednesday morning I took a walk across campus to visit my friend Andrew.
I was pursued by imaginary gunmen on academic building roofs as I made my way across Lot 22.
Their shots could only be avoided by a series of jumps, leaps and dives into ditches. Commands came in clearly through an imaginary earpiece, through which my leader reprimanded me for crossing what amounted to an open field.
I made it all the way to Calkins before I was finally apprehended and bled out in a small snowbank. My death could have been avoided if my friend had walked down the stairs just a little quicker.
But, with him at my side, we were the sole survivors of Snomageddon. The last two people left on Earth, trekking down deer trails in Nelson Park.
When we emerged on Broadway, we greeted the cars we saw as little kids greet Christmas, with huge smiles on our faces, stumbling into the road covered in snow and exhausted.
But our first look down the street showed us the largest snow pile we had ever seen in our lives in the middle of the road. This didn’t require imagination to have a great story.
While drivers treated the mound as a roundabout, we were on top of a mountain throwing snowballs at each other.
We wandered back to campus as life returned to Mount Pleasant. Students were venturing from residence halls to their cars. Others were heading to the library. Some people were even shoveling out their driveways.
As I headed home across the empty lot where I had hours before fled for my life, something was missing.
The imaginary gunmen were still firing, and I was wading in chest-deep snowdrifts along the railroad tracks to stay out of their line of sight, but it didn’t seem as real as three hours earlier.
I think they accidentally plowed up some magic with the snow in lot 22.
