Perhaps the worst part of winter was the gray. Six days out of seven guaranteed some form of cloudiness, as if everything had the blood sucked out of it. There wasn’t even snow, because it was that despicable temperature where it was cold enough to make your toes snap off like icicles but not quite cold enough to form actual ice.

The outdoors were something to be speed-walked through, with your chin burrowed into your coat collar like a tortoise. The indoors were stifling.

Sometimes, all we wanted — the only thing we wanted — was to close the blinds, turn on the fairy lights, burrow under the covers, and wash away our woes with Mitski on high volume until sleep claimed us.

We waited, anxious in The Winterim, like spirits at the gate of the underworld for Winter Break to whisk us away.

Finally, home to greener (or less green, if you live in Quèbec/Maine/Minnesota/any other close-to-50 N-latitude location) pastures! Except the middle half of the United States was wallowing in thigh-high drifts, California was drowning, New England was somehow still snowless, and thousands of flights were canceled in the midst of the holiday travel season. Yippee! Kudos to the international students who braved the chaos.

If you were lucky, maybe you made it to your vacation in Florida, Hawaii, Cuba — anywhere warm and full of forgetfulness. Or maybe, like many of us, you enjoyed a nice mini-hibernation, also warm and full of forgetfulness.

At last, we were brutally yanked from our beds and tossed headfirst into The Actual Winter Term; Winterim was only the prologue. Welcome back to New England. Back to school, back to drearier dreary days and darker dark nights. Except, now seven days out of seven were cloudy; whatever meager dustings of angel-worthy snow were scrubbed out by icy rains until the snow angel was merely a dent in the sidewalk slush. 

We waited, wallowing in the winter, for spring to come again. We’re still waiting for spring. Still waiting.