From Home to Home

I was so excited for my first day of grad school.

After everything it had taken to get there — the acceptance email, packing my life into two suitcases, more than 20 hours of traveling, and that final three-hour drive — I was finally about to walk onto campus as a graduate student.

There was just one thing I had seriously underestimated:

the weather.

I had moved to the North Country in upstate New York, and apparently that should have told me everything I needed to know.

One of my friends, who lives in New York City, had actually warned me about upstate New York before I came. He told me it was cold up there.

I heard him.

I just don’t think I fully understood what he meant. 😂

I had come from Zimbabwe, where 68°F already feels cold and people are ready to huddle around the fire. So when someone told me upstate New York was “cold,” I thought I understood.

I arrived in the middle of August, so in my head, it was still summer. I put on a hoodie and thought I would be perfectly fine.

I was not perfectly fine.

I remember walking around campus thinking, Why am I this cold in August?!

And then another thought immediately followed:

If this is August… what exactly is winter going to be like?

I had never experienced a real winter before. I had never lived somewhere that got snow, and I had never even seen snow in person. So part of me was actually excited about it. Snow looked so beautiful in pictures and movies. I imagined waking up one morning, looking outside, and seeing everything covered in white.

Cute, right?

Well… I hate to break it to the version of me who thought that sounded magical.

Winter was horrible. 😂

The snow itself? Beautiful.

The cold that came with it? Absolutely not.

There is something very humbling about your first North Country winter when you grew up somewhere completely different. Later, when I started dating my now-husband, I told him several times that I was genuinely convinced I was going to freeze to death.

I was being dramatic.

Mostly.

But on that first day of school, I didn’t know any of that yet. I was just excited, slightly freezing in my hoodie, and trying to take everything in.

A new country.
A new school.
A completely different climate.

And I was only just getting started.