Snow Days

Snow in his fur. Snow stuck between his fingers. Snow packed in the creases between his costume and his ankles. Cold, cold, cold. And worst of all, one great big icicle hanging down from the nose holes in his mask. There were some days they did not pay him enough to be Gonga.

He crested the top of yet another snow drift on his hike across campus. Gonga himself enjoyed the brilliance of the snow, once the wind stopped blowing and the sun came out. He liked the strangeness of the power puffing out from beneath his foot, and the excitement that seemed to permeate the campus as students finally emerged from hibernation.

The campus had just survived the great snowpocoalypse of 2011. A grand total of 17 + inches of snow and three snow days in a row! That would not happen again in this decade.

Gonga paused next to a massive drift near one of the few plowed parking lots. He squinted in the sunshine, gauging the height and width of the drift. With a grunt of satisfaction, he knelt down and began to paw away at the side of the drift. In less than fifteen minutes, only his feet could be seen sticking out of the drift, twitching wildly as he carved out a snow cave. Every few minutes he emerged, dragging a huge pile of snow with him.

Once he finished the cave, Gonga crawled in a curled into a little ball. The effort of excavation took over and he quickly drifted into a deep sleep.

Thankfully no snow plows came along during his nap.

When he woke up, he capered over to Stankowskie field and spent the better part of an hour tramping out “THE TEXTBOOK GAME RULES!!!” in the snow. Having completed his work for the day, he added a pair of hearts to the edge of the field and inserted his initials in one. The other he left blank, unwilling to reveal even the first letter of his true love’s name. (And even more unwilling to admit that he had yet to meet her.)