The Snow Remembered Me Before I Remembered It

Four winters after I left, I went back to Syracuse to see if the city still knew my name

The flight from Toronto is barely long enough to finish a coffee. You lift off over one grey lake, cross a strip of Ontario, and before the seatbelt sign goes off you are dropping toward another, and everything below has gone white without asking permission.

I had forgotten that. I had forgotten a lot of things, which is exactly why I was on the plane.

Four winters earlier I had been a master’s student here. Then I did what everyone does: graduated, packed, and left for a warmer, faster city. Syracuse became a line on my CV. When people asked about it I said “cold” and “a lot of snow,” they laughed. I did not like talking a lot about it.

So this Christmas I went back. Not for a reunion, not for anyone’s wedding. Just to walk the old routes and see whether the place still recognized me.

Before

I arrived in the fall of 2021, when the campus was half asleep and half masked, to start a degree at the School of Education. I knew nobody. I knew the city from a welcome slideshow: the Salt City, the Orange, the snow.

What I did not know was how to be a graduate student in a second language, in a small American city, during the pandemic.

Marshall Street in my first weeks in September, before I knew which way was up the hill. Photo by author.

This was my first corner. Marshall Street, the Starbucks on the left, the orange S on the lamppost, the green bike lane running toward the glass atrium at the end of the block. I took the photo because everything in it was new, including the particular grey of a central New York sky that I would later learn is its default setting from November to Feburary.

October 2021. The first thing Syracuse gave me was a hill and a view. Photo by author.

Then the trees turned. One friend took me up to Thorndale Park, one blue afternoon in October, and I walked out onto the grass in a red jacket and looked at the whole city spread under the foliage. It was the first time I felt the place might be mine. I did not have the words for that in English yet. I had them in Chinese, and I kept them to myself.

The First Night

Lake-effect snow downtown. Photo by author.

The city answered on the first night. I had barely put my bag down when the lake-effect snow came in, the kind that doesn’t fall so much as travel horizontally. I stood on the porch with my phone out, filming a car that was slowly becoming a hill, and laughed out loud.

This was the Syracuse I had been describing to people for four years with a single word. Except now the word felt insufficient. There is nothing “cold” about that light. The streetlamp turns the snow amber, the windows across the road go warm and yellow, and the whole street looks like it has been wrapped for the holidays.

The numbers, which I looked up only afterwards, are almost comic. Syracuse averages about 128 inches of snow a year, more than ten feet, and it regularly wins the Golden Snowball, an award the weather offices of upstate New York pass to whichever city gets buried deepest. The culprit is Lake Ontario, the same grey water I had flown across an hour earlier. For two years I had lived under that snow. I had simply never thought of it as coming from anywhere.

Comstock Avenue, Again

The next morning I walked to Comstock Avenue, because that was the walk. To class, to the bus, to the grocery store, to everything.

I stopped under the STOP sign for a long time. The houses were the same: the brown one with the bay window, the grey one with the porch, the sagging power lines, the sidewalk that in December is less a sidewalk than a suggestion of one. The plow had pushed a ridge of snow against the curb the way it always did, and someone had already cut a narrow path through it, the way someone always did.

What surprised me was how little I felt like a visitor. I wasn’t looking at the street; I was checking it, the way you check a room you have just come back to, to see whether anything has been moved. Nothing had.

The Buildings

Syracuse was a salt town before it was a college town. The springs around Onondaga Lake, on the land of the Onondaga Nation, were boiled down for salt through the nineteenth century, and the Erie Canal came through in 1825 to carry it away. Standing on Comstock in the wind, salt was suddenly the most sensible thing in the world: the road under my boots was black and wet where everything else was white, and I could taste it in the air.

Upstate New York features a rich mix of historic and modern architectural styles shaped by its colonial past, which could not be found anywhere else. It seems like every house in the small city and around the campus has a story to tell. 

The Hill

You cannot go back to Syracuse without climbing the hill, and you cannot climb the hill without meeting Crouse College, Crouse College is a historic Richardsonian Romanesque building on the Syracuse University campus.

It sits at the top like something from a different century, all red sandstone and turrets, with a clock tower that seems to be judging you a little.

It has been judging people since 1889, when a merchant named John Crouse paid half a million dollars to put it on the highest ground the young university owned. When it was finished it was the tallest building in the city. A student group called the Chimesmasters still climbs the tower to ring its bells which became a unique experience for the campus. The week I visited, the tower was silent. I would have liked to hear it.

Four years ago it was scenery, the thing I walked past, out of breath, between the library and wherever I was supposed to be. This time I climbed slowly, one snow-packed step at a time, and when I reached the top I turned around and looked at the way I had come.

I had a friend take a picture of me on the railing. I usually hate photos of myself. I wanted this one. I wanted proof that I had come back on purpose, not passed through.

And then, because the hill was empty and there was no one around to be embarrassed in front of, I stood in the snow and pointed at the whole thing like a tour guide with one client. That’s where I went to school. I said it to nobody. The snow took it.

The People Who Stayed

Not everyone leaves. Lizzy stayed, and on the second afternoon we sat in a café with the snow piled agnst the window behind us and took a selfie, both of us flashing peace signs, her in leopard print. We talked about life in the past years and how we see the evolution of the United States. At some point I realized I had stopped checking the time, which I do not do anywhere else.

Christmas Decoration

On my last night I walked without a destination, which in Syracuse in December is a small act of faith. I ended up in front of a house with a 33 on the door and an entire nativity of electricity in the yard: two wire reindeer, a sleigh, a bush wrapped in warm white lights, a snowman waving from beside the steps.

I stood on the sidewalk for a while in the cold, the way you stand in front of a shop window as a child, and I thought: this is the closest thing to a welcome a city can give you. Nobody put those lights up for me. They put them up for whoever walked by. That week, I was whoever walked by.

What I Found

Sometimes people went to different places and cities ramdonly. I went to Syracuse for closure and didn’t get it, which I think is the point. Places don’t close. They keep going without you, plowing the same corners, lighting the same porches, filling the same stairs with snow every December whether or not you are there to climb them.

What I got instead was smaller and better. A corner I could still navigate blind. A building I had never really looked at. An afternoon with a friend where the clock stopped. A house that lit its yard for strangers and counted me as one.

I came in by air and left by road. On the bus back south in January, the white outside the window turned to brown again somewhere around Scranton, and this time I watched it go.