by David Melton
It will officially be springtime by the time you read this. But if you sit where I do, right now, springtime is a dream. Boston has experienced the snowiest six weeks on record — and it has been almost the coldest as well.
How have we managed? Some of you have been kind enough to text or email, a few have even called to check on us. Thanks. It hasn’t been easy. C’mon, we even had to reschedule a Super Bowl victory rally in downtown Boston! We embraced the snow for the first few weeks. We called it Snow-mageddon and some of our students even built this monstrous snow “thing” out in front of Henry Hall. But this winter just would not stop! Even our trustee meetings got “blizzarded” out! I finally started looking at students asking God if we had a “snow Jonah” on campus — throw somebody out and maybe then it would stop!
Everybody around here knows I cancel classes for “snow days” at about the same rate as I embrace New York sports teams. Yet we have missed five days of classes in just five weeks! No choice. Many of those we cancelled because the city or state officials were ordering people to stay home. The clincher of how bad it really has been dawned on me a few days back. I was about to walk out the door and went to put on my snow boots for yet another day. I slid my feet in and as I hit the front steps I noticed it. At some point in the past few weeks, I had tied my boot strings about half way up, so I could get in and out of my boots faster. This is the ultimate commentary on the winter of 2015. Snow-slipper-boots. When you have begun to think of snow boots as your “slippers” you just know it has been a winter like no other.
Let me tell you what that means, in real terms, for us at Boston Baptist College. Every typical storm costs us about $1,000 just for snow removal. We are so far over budget it is amazing. Our energy budget is upside down, with record costs to adequately heat our buildings. And we can’t even see what physical repairs will be necessary — because the snow and ice hasn’t melted yet. We can tell that we don’t expect to have a single gutter anywhere on our property that will survive the winter of 2015 intact. Wow, what a winter.
So as it warms up, soak it all in. When (if) that happens here we sure will! But don’t forget the cold. The past few months have been for us like natural disasters in other climates — ice storms for some of you, wind storms for other. The cleanup is enormous and expensive. We sure will need your financial help to put the winter of 2015 behind us.