During the time when I was still a school kid with limited access to the outside world, I used to build up my worldview through, although inevitably other sources of mass media, mainly books.

One set of the books among my collection was “Little House On The Prairie,” which gave me my first impression of the United States and lovely, courageous people possessing this country’s spirit. Years have passed since the last time I read those books and stories recounted in them faded to the back of my mind, but some specific details, the intriguing ones, stuck around in my mind. Among which is about one abnormally long winter that the author’s family experienced during their time as pioneers in Dakota:

"An old Native American man comes to the general store in town to warn the white settlers that there will be seven months of blizzards."

According to Laura Ingalls, the author and the protagonist of these stories, this old Native American lived long enough to observe and to sum up a pattern of winters in this particular part of North America continent: every seventh winter is extra long, and every third of these seventh winters, namely every 21st winter, would be brutally long and frigid, and a succession of blizzards would take away amateur settlers’ lives.

Then, wrote Laura, the first blizzard came in the middle of October and lasted for 7 months.

“Seven months,” I thought back then, as I crouched deeper into my comforter during a rather harsh winter in Beijing. “That’s more than half a year. It’s ridiculous.”

This curious, enticing recount about long winters and blizzards in North America took deep root in my mind, forming into a portion of my first impression on the United States, taking a stand in amongst the mixture of its other stereotypical features that Chinese mainstream medias fed me in the 2000s.

I was roughly 8 by then. 10 years later, I put myself into this land I’ve been picturing in my mind. I arrived in late August, and just two months later, clusters of snowflakes are starting to pound on the top of my head.

It was just after class when I came to the hallway and saw the astounding whiteness outside the window. I was excited. I used to dwell in a rather cold region in China, but that region was not humid enough for snows to happen.

Behaving naturally as a stranger to snow, I shouted out “wow yeah,” while a sophomore standing beside me was being somehow unnervingly nonchalant.

“You are allowed to be excited because you’re a first-year,” the sophomore sounded very experienced. “But snow in October is never a good sign.”

Then she walked away, sighing.

As I walked around campus, I saw a blend of impassioned first-years from warm regions and pessimistic others worrying about the incoming 5 to 6 months. “Snow in October means snow in April,” they said as they shook their heads. “It is going to be harsh.”

I cannot help but relate these snow-haters to the old Native American I read about when I was little—they were just as sophisticated, erudite and experienced.

I cannot help but relate this October snow to that story on the whole. I am thrilled to find that maybe this somehow mythical telling of the old Native American is true, that maybe I am going to experience the same 21st winter like it was described in the book, starting in late October.

I know it would be the far from fun, for breeze and 4-feet accumulated snow would cause great trouble, but I still am thrilled.