Attn West Coast: Winter is not always terrible.

There's a feeling in the northeast that I had forgotten about. Sometimes it's really lousy and nasty out for a long time. Like how it stays cold until the end of March but there's no fresh snow, it's just cold and bitter. But all those months of gray make that first spring thaw so much more beautiful.

I won't even pretend to have endured months of cold - I've only been home two weeks - but on Wednesday, I saw the sun after days of storming that dumped nearly two feet of snow in my backyard.

It is becoming a family tradition to take a trip to a different South-Central than the one I'm used to - the South-Central Maine Coast. Since I first visited Acadia National Park in middle school, I have thought it to be one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. My appreciation for it rivals my alter ego's love of the Central California Coast. On Wednesday, via snowshoe, I was fortunate enough to see those parts of the park that truly remain untouched during the winter. The ground was uniformly covered in a thick but manageable layer of snow, leaving the branches of every tree weighted with heavy powder. The sky was as bright a blue as I've ever seen, dotted with fluffy white clouds. And I could feel the cleanness of the air, an unusual crispness compared to the atmosphere in LA. Sounds like heaven, right? Yeah, I think it was.

Anyway, after stomping through the woods and making our way down to a beach, my brother and I climbed up to where a trail meandered alongside the Park Loop Road - usually busy with traffic in the summertime, but silent except for the occasional snowmobile in this season. By 2:00pm, the sun was noticeably lower in the sky and a few large gray clouds drifted over it, causing the ripples in the small inlet by Otter Cliffs to go from their gleaming silver to a matted navy blue. Simultaneously, another cloud drifted just below the sun, and the rays of light shone through it like distinct beams. And that was it. That moment made the gray of the days before and the icy cold temperatures and the biting winds worth it.

I guess all the stars aligned this week - the weather was beautiful (cold, yes, but bearable), there was fresh snowfall, and I had nothing else I needed to do. In a little over a week, I will be back in class four days a week, undoubtedly swamped with problem sets, and hopefully training hard for spring races. A day like that made all that worry melt. I don't know what I want to do with my life, but I want more of this.