In my town, dirty snow sits in piles on sidewalks and front lawns. The sky is the color of gunmetal; the cold reaches up to it and seeps indoors at the windows, whose glass rattles against the wind. In the morning the windshield wipers are frozen to the bottom of the windshield, unless we remember to raise them the night before. Our cat sleeps more than normal.

Where I’m from – Massachusetts – winter stretches on interminably. Back in Georgetown, daffodils are nosing upward and spring seems ready to take its first breath. Here it’s cold, cold: next week will be and next month will be, too. Where I’m from people deal with it. You only see countdowns to March 21 on roadside signs at nurseries, whose business will be slow until the earth softens again.

Massachusetts has four months of warm and eight of cold – I never tire of D.C.’s spring beginning in late February. Spring is a time to be giddy, a time to be young and enjoy being young; it can’t come soon enough. Last week I suggested that we Georgetowners need to mellow out a little – to stop and smell the proverbial roses. Spring is the embodiment of that attitude. When the weather warms it gets a lot harder to focus on school and a lot easier to loll about outside.

Coming home is a return to the places that made me who I am. It’s a return to parents – a reminder that I come from somewhere and that I will, eventually, be going somewhere in life. And in February, it’s a return to cold and a landscape that’s brown and lifeless. The only thing alive in winter where I’m from is the ocean – its breath the waves that batter empty beaches; its temper flaring during storms; its emotions reflected in its colors, shared with the sky and changing hourly.

I’ve lived by the ocean since I was six. Since I was old enough to understand Big Ideas I’ve liked looking at it, looking at the horizon and imagining I could make out the distant coast of Portugal or Morocco. Being able to do that – to look and look, and imagine – is a kind of gazing you only get to do on the edge of an ocean. It’s always been the closest thing, I think, to seeing into the future.

But for most of the year I don’t live near an ocean. The closest thing Georgetown has is the muddy, underwhelming Potomac. No longer can I gaze at the sea and think about the future; at Georgetown I live strictly in the present. But isn’t that exactly where I should be – where all of us should be? We should – as I said last week – be enjoying what’s right in front of us and not planning our lives to the finest detail. Not living near the ocean is a gift, for those of us given to dreaming idly.

I’ll go to the edge of the sea this weekend and I’ll look. If it’s not too cold I’ll sit, maybe, and think. I’ll see what I’ve always seen: the future, my future, stretching before me, too vast to fully comprehend. But then I’ll turn and leave. I’ll be left with just myself, in the present, and I’ll be happy with that. If all Georgetown taught me was how to be glad for the present, I’d consider the last four years well-spent.