I was a first-year walking to the library in November 2024 as snow began to fall. I was amazed that it would snow so early in the year, and kept refreshing my inbox in anticipation of the email that would tell me my Spanish class had been canceled. 

That email never came.

In Texas, the thought of going to school while snow is actively falling is borderline unthinkable. If my city had looked like Des Moines has looked for the past few weeks — freezing temperatures, ice on the roads, snow staying on the ground for several days — then school would have been canceled, businesses shut down and no one would dare to drive. The state’s power grid would have failed on day two, and our senator would have fled to Cancun. In Texas, it’s not expected that anyone in our state will function normally.

At Drake, my Minnesotan best friend loves to tease me about my poor tolerance for cold weather. Someone recently laughed at my wearing gloves. And I get it. A lot of Drake students are from the Midwest or at least somewhere colder than Texas, so they’re acclimated. But I’m not. 

Thankfully, it doesn’t snow very much in Texas. I’ve been blessed with many 70-degree Christmases and very few snowstorms in my life. But when winter does hit Texas, it throws a knockout punch. 

The winter storm of February 2021 — colloquially termed the Great Texas Freeze, although Texans refer to it as Snowmaggedon — turned my home state into a national laughingstock. While the rest of the country adequately managed the polar vortex that swept the nation, Texas went into a state of emergency that made me deeply distrustful of cold weather.

I don’t think the rest of the country understands how devastating those couple of weeks were. Our power grid — disconnected from the national grids and unable to provide enough electricity to Texans or import energy from anywhere else — failed for days. The demand for electricity overwhelmed the supply, and the power equipment itself froze and failed. Only four minutes from total failure, the Energy Reliability Council of Texas implemented rolling blackouts to prevent a statewide blackout that would have taken weeks to reverse. If I remember correctly, ERCOT’s blackouts gave us about one hour of power every six to eight hours. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it was all we had. 

For more than a week, my family confined ourselves to one room of the house. We bundled in layers of clothing and made nests out of blankets. We dragged mattresses in front of the fireplace and cuddled up with our two dogs. As the freeze continued, internal temperatures plummeted. I remember our thermostat informing us it had reached 35 degrees inside our house. 

When the clicks and beeps alerted us that we had power again, we moved quickly: charging devices, boiling water, cooking small meals. We were never sure when the next opportunity would be.

I don’t know if y’all understand that this was the worst energy infrastructure failure in Texas state history. We had shortages not only of electricity, but of water and food as well. Our pipes froze and burst because in Texas, pipes aren’t designed for cold weather. Insurance in the state rarely covers those types of incidents, leaving thousands of people with thousands of dollars in damages that they couldn’t pay. 

Frozen pipes meant that some cities were without water. Counties warned residents not to drip faucets even in freezing temperatures because we simply didn’t have enough water to waste. Low water pressure meant that we were advised to boil water for safety, even as we didn’t have the power to turn on our stoves. Grocery store shelves were bare and, trapped inside their homes, Texans’ food supplies quickly ran out.

Millions were without power. Hundreds died, with the worst impacts felt among the elderly and the homeless. ERCOT should have done better; it was preventable, and we were horrifically unprepared. But that’s not the point.

The point is, when you come from a state where you’re grateful to be alive after that event, Des Moines’ casual treatment of winter is a shock. During that storm, DFW, where I’m from, received 5 inches of snow. In Des Moines, that’s light work. In Texas, it’s deadly. 

So when my peers at Drake joke about my poor tolerance for the cold, it’s hard to laugh along. On one hand, yeah, it’s funny that the girl from the South doesn’t handle the cold very well. But on the other hand, my caution around the cold is more than superficial physical discomfort. 

Y’all don’t realize that you’re taking for granted that the power stays on and you’re not going to literally freeze to death. You’re taking for granted that your pipes won’t freeze or burst. You’re taking for granted that the roads will be iced and the snow shoveled. And that’s how it should be. But after seeing my state shut down, that’s not an assumption that I can so easily make.