The world had been reset overnight.
As I rushed to my 9 a.m.—a feat in itself for someone who is chronically late and in a committed relationship with the snooze button—I stepped outside my entryway in Jonathan Edwards College and, for once, stopped. Yale was wrapped in white. The Gothic brick buildings, the benches, the rooftops—all softened under a fresh, untouched layer of snow. Even as someone who grew up in Michigan, where snow is as common as potholes and seasonal depression, I had to admit: this was objectively nice. Had I been a little less cold and a little less sleep-deprived, I might have even called it beautiful.
And with snow, of course, comes snowmen.
As I walked to class, I saw them popping up across campus. A tiny snowman leaning against a tree outside the Law School. A snow dog with pencils for limbs by Sterling. Students rolling oversized snowballs with the kind of manic energy usually reserved for midterms and existential crises in Bass Library. It was oddly comforting that, despite the chaos of Yale—where we are shackled to Google Calendars and caffeinated by sheer necessity—people stopped to build snowmen. No agenda, no deadline—just pure, childlike joy. A rare phenomenon in a place where even mindfulness and mental breakdowns are scheduled in 15-minute color-coded blocks.
I wanted to join in, but unfortunately, I had sold my soul to academia (Yale ain’t cheap!), at least for the next two hours, and was legally—well, financially—obligated to attend class.
I traded the golden afternoon light for the sterile fluorescence of a windowless classroom. In my writing seminar, Writing on Faith, we spent the day dissecting grace—what it is, what it isn’t, and whether anyone truly understands it. Definitions ranged from “God’s favor” to “patience” to something about kindness, though by the end of class, I didn’t feel any closer to enlightenment. Grace was, apparently, one of those things like modern art or the stock market—everyone had a different definition, and none of them made sense to me.
As I left WLH, the sun spilled over Cross Campus like a well-timed movie montage, filtering through the snow like lemonade through a sieve—or maybe a very weak Brita filter. The air was crisp, the snow untouched, the kind of winter scene that makes you forget your fingers are actively freezing off. And there, in the middle of it all, stood a smiling snowman—the final product of the group I had seen earlier.
He had little stick arms, a mostly rounded head (with a few dents here and there), and a lopsided but sincere face—the kind of face only someone who had never seen snow before could love. He was a snowman built not just of snow, but of sheer optimism and a fundamental misunderstanding of structural integrity. He stood there, slightly uneven, as if deeply unsure of his own existence but too polite to question it. My classmate Cienna appeared beside me, equally enchanted. “Pics or it didn’t happen,” she said, pulling out her phone. We stood there, smiling, enjoying his company and the afternoon sunlight.
And then—the murder.
A group of guys came barreling across the quad, laughing, yelling, exuding the general energy of people who have never been told “no.” Before I could even process what was happening, one of them torpedoed himself into the snowman with the reckless abandon of a man who thinks parkour is a personality. The head shot off like a champagne cork, bouncing once before landing facedown in the snow—as if even in death, it was too ashamed to watch what happened next.
The others descended like starved seagulls on a dropped french fry. Kicking, stomping, howling with joy, they executed their attack with the kind of military precision that suggested this was not their first time killing an innocent. What was once a respectable, well-formed member of the winter community was now a corpse. Stick arms ripped from their sockets, amputated. It no longer looked like a snowman—more like a failed avant-garde art installation or a deflated beanbag chair someone had kicked to the curb.
Cienna and I stood there, frozen—both emotionally and, given the temperature, quite literally—stunned to silence. I couldn’t decide what was colder—the New Haven air or the soulless depths of the men who had just committed snowman homicide.
I should have yelled. Cursed them out. Demanded justice. But instead, my brain, in its infinite wisdom, decided to fixate on grace. Grace, which I had spent the last two hours discussing in class, pretending to understand. Grace, which I was supposed to extend to others, even when they did not deserve it. Grace, which was now being tested at the sight of a snowman’s severed head, face-planted into the ground like a Yale student after a particularly brutal physics exam.
And then I remembered—this wasn’t the first time.
Years ago, on an elementary school playground, I had built a snowman. He was small, a little lumpy, but mine. I had spent my entire recess stacking him just right, carefully packing snow with mittened hands. And then, just as I stepped back to admire my work, a fourth-grade sociopath—a child who had most certainly grown up to major in finance—charged at it full speed and kicked it to pieces.
I said nothing. I just stood there, blinking hard, willing my face to remain neutral as I swallowed down the lump in my throat. I had walked away then, fists clenched, stuffing my hurt into the deep, impenetrable Pandora’s box of childhood injustices.
But this time, I didn’t walk away. I bent down. And I picked up a handful of snow.
Sadly, not to hurl at the men, though they were long gone—fleeing the scene of their frosty felony like cowards, no doubt, off to kick another innocent snow creature in some other unfortunate courtyard. Instead, I crouched down with grace (both the divine concept and the kind you force upon yourself when you’re trying not to lose your dignity).
“I’m putting him back together,” I declared, chin lifted toward the sky in righteous indignation, hoisting my dress slightly as I knelt—with the dramatic urgency of a Disney princess. I was somewhere between Cinderella scrubbing floors in existential despair and Elsa belting her way through an identity crisis—a tragic yet determined figure, except instead of a kingdom at stake, it was an amputated snowman.
Cienna, laughing, tagged along, her breath curling in the cold like visible proof that at least some of us had a soul. I yanked a pair of gloves from my backpack with the flourish of a magician revealing a final trick, while Cienna, gloveless and therefore exempt from manual labor, took on the role of emotional support crew.
The resurrection was not easy. The snow had hardened into something closer to concrete mixed with spite. My fingers, even gloved, ached as I clawed at it, shaping and packing, trying to will it into submission. Every handful felt like I was wrestling an uncooperative yeti.
My sneakers, designed for the relatively mild demands of walking, proved themselves wholly unqualified for the role of snow construction gear. Every movement sent me sliding across the icy ground like a discount figure skater who had somehow made it to the Olympics by accident. At one point, my balance failed entirely, and I found myself descending into a full accidental split. Cienna seemed far more impressed by my near-athletic feat than my snow engineering skills. The snowman was coming along, but my unintentional display of flexibility had stolen the show.
Still, I persisted. I reconstructed Pete’s torso, reassembling his fallen remains with the dedication of a scientist in a questionable Frankenstein experiment. Every handful of packed snow was an act of defiance, a rejection of the forces of destruction that had reduced him to rubble. His new arms, selected with great care from nearby branches, were pressed into place. Then came the finishing touches. I scavenged for leaves, meticulously inspecting each one before deeming it worthy of becoming his new set of eyes. They weren’t perfectly even, but that only made him look wiser—like a man who had seen things and come out stronger, even if slightly asymmetrical. It built character.
At last, Cienna and I stepped back. He was reborn—not as he once was, but tougher, wiser, and significantly more weathered. Ready to face the cruelty of the world—and harder, since much of the snow had fused into an unintentional ice sculpture.
“He needs a name,” Cienna announced. She tilted her head, squinting like an art critic searching for hidden meaning in a blank canvas. “I don’t know what it is… but he just radiates Peter energy.”
I nodded solemnly. “Perhaps… Pete.”
And so Pete he was. We stood there, admiring our work—his slightly bumpy form, his carefully chosen stick arms, his mismatched stick eyes that somehow made him look both enlightened and slightly alarmed. He had suffered, but he had returned. Pete was proof that destruction is not the end.
And for Pete, I would act. I had just spent an entire class discussing grace—how to extend it, how to receive it, how to wield it like an intellectual weapon rather than a blunt instrument of rage. I was proud of myself for not swearing at the men who had destroyed him, for not hurling snowballs at their heads in righteous fury. No, I am a Yale student. I would reclaim my power in the most insufferably academic way possible: through poetry.
And not just for Pete. For my childhood self, who once built a snowman with care, only to watch it be reduced to a pile of unrecognizable slush—who bit her lip, shoved her hands deep into her coat pockets, and walked away, pretending it didn’t matter. This time, I would not walk away. This time, I refused to stay silent. I threw up my fists with the righteous indignation of Draco Malfoy declaring, “My father will hear about this,” except in my case, it was “The Yale Daily News will hear about this.”
So, instead of swearing at the men who destroyed him, I shall reclaim my voice in the form of a sonnet.
Oh Pete, reborn from snow so white,
Thy fate was cruel, thy end not right.
Struck down by men whose hearts were small,
Yet risen again, defying all.
With twigs for arms and leaves for sight,
You braved the cold, embraced the fight.
Though kicked, though slain, though torn apart,
Still warmth resides within thy heart.
And though your life was short and fleet,
You did not fall—you found repeat.
So let the snow, the frost, the sleet,
Remember thee, our dear sweet Pete.
I left Cross Campus smiling, feeling victorious, knowing Pete had been resurrected. I had rebuilt, resisted, restored order to a world that, for a brief moment, had been devoid of justice. Pete was back, I thought.
But when I returned that night, Pete was nowhere to be found. I scanned the field of snow, searching for any trace of him—a stray twig, a lump of packed ice, anything. But there was nothing.
Then, in the far left corner of Cross Campus, movement. In Pete’s place stood something bigger. A monstrous, towering snowman, at least seven feet tall, looming over what could only be described as a live-action battlefield.
On one side, a coalition of determined builders—engineers, probably, or at least people who knew how to use a protractor correctly. They were reinforcing their creation with the focus of men who had abandoned their p-sets for this. On the other, a rowdy gang armed with shovels and a dangerous amount of free time, pacing like wolves, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. This could only mean war.
As I approached, a sudden hush fell over the crowd. One of the guys—presumably the leader of the shovel-wielding anarchists—threw up a hand, like a commander halting his troops.
“Whoa, guys, stop. A woman is coming through.”
And just like that, the battlefield paused. Like some bizarre act of chivalry, they stepped aside, creating a solemn path for me to pass, as if I were some war-weary diplomat caught between rival factions. I nodded, shuffled awkwardly between them, and stepped over what I am fairly certain was once Pete’s torso.
From a safe distance—a grand six feet, a skill I perfected during COVID—I turned back to watch. The battle resumed—one side creating, one side destroying, both deeply convinced of their own moral righteousness. This was no longer about Pete. This was the eternal struggle between order and entropy. The fragile balance between creation and destruction. The inevitable cycle of human nature, playing out in the form of an increasingly unstable pile of snow.
I watched for a moment longer, then turned and walked home to Jonathan Edwards College, leaving the fate of the battlefield to the imagination—or at least to the next wave of students passing through.
By morning, it was all gone. The snow had melted. The battlefield erased. The war forgotten.
But Pete? Pete lived on. Not in snow, but in legend. Specifically, immortalized in the Yale Daily News. He had been documented, archived, and therefore, by the modern laws of technology, granted immortality.
The world had been reset overnight once more. But Pete had entered the cloud—both the digital one and the kind that snow eventually returns to.