Can winter cold expose maturity?

It was 25 below zero in Kitchener last week. If I was still in high school, it would have meant an Unofficial Snow Day: one of those days when it’s just too cold to stand at the bus stop.

It’s a dream of every high school student. You walk into the kitchen one morning and your parents say, “School? Nah. Why not just take the day off?”

If that had ever happened, I would have been back in bed asleep even before their sentence was complete, not bothering to stop and wonder about the likelihood of both parents having had a mini-stroke at the same time. But in university, it’s suddenly not my life mission to miss as much school as possible.

It’s a change that I didn’t expect.