“Winter on Campus”

“Seeing Princeton once had been enough to cause Skylar to fall in love with the University’s physical beauty. But viewing the place pillowed in down and spread with duvets smoothly immaculate, elevated its charm to an almost-painful level. The campus cushioned and enwrapped in snow represented one’s ever-alluring lover, now ravishing, radiant, and enchanting on her wedding day. What sound had not previously been swallowed by the broad masses of stone now got damped by the corporeal contours of the drifts. Coarse, rocky, gray window ledges supported fine-grained, polished, white equivalents, seemingly deposited by a teasing Skadi, the Norse goddess of winter, to show the sublime advantage of ephemerality over false permanence. Young trees looked as though they had been dipped in powdered sugar; older and larger ones carried long curbs of snow along the lengths of their branches, until gravity caused these structures to collapse in shivered parachutes headed for the ground. At night, atop the lampposts but beneath their cone-heads (now banded in little muffs), the bulbs (like camera flashcubes) impudently scorched, in irregular splotches, the crisped undulations nearby, but painted hillocks at a short distance in oceanic turquoise and tinted still-more-remote mounds in tender lavender. Bushes now wore ermine hats. Magnolias seemed to have senesced overnight. Aisles of furry elms formed India ink arabesques set against off-white Ingres paper. Foot-traffic patterns on outside stair flights created alternations of light and dark shapes that might have been yet-undeciphered hieroglyphics.”