Just over a week ago I flew back to Atlanta for school. The moment I stepped out of the airport, I saw snow piled along the roadside.
I kicked at it once and realized the snowfall itself had already passed days earlier.
It felt a pity. 2024 seemed destined to be another year without snow. The last time I went a whole year without seeing any was 2022, and a snowless winter always feels as though something essential is missing.
Still, under the broader arc of climate change, winters with less and less snow feel almost inevitable.
Strangely enough, Atlanta—so firmly Southern—shouldn’t see much snow at all. The last time the city had snowfall this heavy was three years ago. Back then, my impression of Atlanta was limited to the Hawks’ home court and the Blade Show.
On January 20th, Martin Luther King Jr. Day—and also the day of Trump’s inauguration—the university announced a severe cold warning: no classes the next day.
That email hit me like a slap back into the deep snows of 2022, dragging up memories of remote classes.
2025 was never going to be an easy year. Wildfires in Los Angeles forced people from their homes, while the South froze so hard people couldn’t step outside. America had truly fallen into “fire and flood.”
On the 21st, halfway through an online class, snow began to fall again. This was Atlanta’s second snowfall. The last time I’d seen snow this heavy was probably during a middle-school trip to Hokkaido.
I couldn’t shake a strange feeling: with Trump’s election, the first snowfall felt like Carter’s helpless farewell, while the second resembled The Injustice to Dou E. Trump beheads the Paris Agreement; the left cries out to heaven in grief—and Atlanta answers with snow three feet deep.
I love snowy days. Snow conceals the filth on the ground, which is why people call it pure. But dialectically speaking, when everything in sight turns white, those sharp, ugly protrusions stand out even more starkly.
Take my Hasselblad, for instance. Shooting in the snow, I finally noticed a faint purplish cast along the edges of the images—maybe a failing CMOS sensor. If it hadn’t snowed, I might not have discovered the problem for a long time.
It made me quietly sad. In the end, I had no choice but to turn the photos into black and white.
After all, the snowy earth already looks monochrome—and that, too, is one of the pleasures a snowfall brings.