Yesterday, it snowed at the University during the course of a semester for the first time in four years. And I mean snowed.

Surely if you’ve been keeping up with the weather recently (as of the time of this writing), you’ve heard all about the freak snowstorm that’s been going through the South. Well, at roughly 10:00 on January 27, 2000, snow started falling at the Baptist Student Center, where I was.

Now, I’m a big fan of snow. I come from a place that doesn’t get it much, so seeing it and being in it is a big deal to me. But I thought it really interesting that two of my friends who were there with me were witnessing their first snowfall ever. I mean, they’d seen snow, but they’d never seen it falling before. And these are college students. Seeing the look on their faces was like getting a view at a 6-year-old’s face on Christmas morning.

And what do we do when we find out it’s snowing? We have a snowball fight, of course. Right out there in the parking lot of the student center. Roughly 15 college students acting like little kids in the snow. A block away or so, out on the Quad, I heard that hundreds of other students were doing the same thing.

Now, like I said, we were all college students here. But this was all perfectly sane for us to do — because it was snowing.

This brings up an interesting point. Falling snow in Alabama is one of the few things I have ever seen that can take all kinds of people, each with their own troubles and cares, and bring them together to forget all of that and just be free. It allows them to release all of that worry, replacing it with the fear that the next snowball thrown is going to knock you smack in the head. In other words, it made us childlike again. It made us pure, in a way, like the very snow that was falling.

I loved it. We got about 5 inches or so of it. By the time morning came around, the snow had turned to a steady rain, and most of the snow had been turned to slush and water by it. And with it, you could feel a part of the kid in all of us leave.

Sometimes I wish that we’d have a snowstorm like this more often, so we can have more times like this. But I also realize that having them only every once in a while makes it special…it helps us to see it not from the weary eyes of college students, but from the bright eyes of children ready to get out and catch flakes on their tongues and build snowmen. It lets us relive, if just for a little while, those times when we were didn’t have to think about so much and were more innocent. More pure, like the driven snow.