by Maria Mantini ’26 on February 5, 2026

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Opinion - Campus

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On Jan. 25, I watched from my window as mounds of snow began to accumulate all over campus and visibility lowered to a cloudy white haze. With classes canceled for the next day, this was a prime day to catch up with friends, binge watch the show you’ve been meaning to start, or grab whatever you could find in your dorm and go sledding down the Guzman Hall hill. By the end of the day, the snow was knee-deep. After the snowfall continued into Monday, parts of Rhode Island were left covered in 11.5–20 inches of snow.

By Tuesday, the college was able to hold classes and most pathways had been salted and cleared off. However, there was one blaring exception to the college’s clean-up efforts: the student parking lots. A quick walk through any student lot on campus proved that cars that were parked before the storm were still parked there a few days later, unable to move from the mounds of snow that surrounded them.

My friend is currently a full-time student teacher at a local elementary school. After a virtual teaching day on Monday, we walked to the Hunt-Cavanagh Lot to check on her car and it was clear that she would not be able to drive it the next day. The snow surrounding the car was over a foot deep and extended more than a foot behind it. While plows had come through to clear open parts of the lot, no effort had been made to remove the snow near any of the cars.

Relying on her car to get to student teaching, she went to the Office of Public Safety to ask when the lots would be cleared, to which the answer was a firm, “we don’t know.” This lapse in effort on the part of the college caused her to miss student teaching on Tuesday (a day she will have to make up later in the semester) and take an Uber to her school on Wednesday. Other student teachers expressed similar concerns about their ability to travel and even their reputations for having to miss work. Providence College should not be preventing students from being able to attend something that is part of their required course of studies.

With faculty lots largely cleared, it seems that the priority in the clean up was the college’s ability to hold classes as soon as possible. My friend received no communication from Public Safety or the Office of Transportation about what to do or what the timeline was for clearing the lots. She even mentioned to me that she wouldn’t mind shoveling out her own car if the college provided shovels. Instead, she was left desperately asking around for one, not anticipating beforehand that this would be a problem. Her car was not cleared out until Wednesday night.

With the $400 students are paying a year to park on campus, the lack of attention and communication about this matter is appalling. Many students do not keep cars on campus just for fun, but rather rely on them to get to student teaching, jobs, nursing clinicals, or other obligations. It is understandable that the college would need some time to get snow cleared away after a storm of this magnitude, but the student lots were cleared days after the rest of campus was. The least Providence College could have done was communicate the plans to their students. By not making an effort to assist with this matter and giving no clear timeline for this work to be done, the school is making a stark statement that these student interests are a low priority.

by Clara Johnson ’26 on February 5, 2026

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News - National & Global

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Last week, a winter storm characterized by ice, sleet, and copious amounts of snow struck the United States, causing major power outages, severe damage, and inaccessible roads. The storm, which has been unofficially named Winter Storm Fern by the Weather Channel, brought historic weather to large swaths of Mexico, Canada, and the U.S.

In the Northeast, over a foot of snow fell, with some places, including Providence, RI, experiencing more than 20 inches of snow. The snowfall resulted in school and business closures across the region, though most institutions were able to reopen by mid-week. Across the country, there were record low temperatures that have not been seen in decades. In some states, the wind chill reached as low as negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

While loads of snow were dumped in the Northeast, the South was frozen over. A deep freeze brought ice, which weighed down powerlines and trees, causing them to snap. These downed powerlines and fallen trees caused hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses to lose power. Obstruction caused by tree branches and ice have made it difficult for the National Electric Service to restore power in many of these places. In many Southern localities, infrastructure was overwhelmed, as these areas are not accustomed to contending with such harsh winter storms. As of this week, 136,000 people across the U.S. still remain without power in the freezing weather.

One city that was hit particularly hard by outages was Nashville, TN, with one resident telling The Cowl, “We were without power and heat for six days and still don’t have hot water.” She went on to describe, “It felt almost like a hurricane. Things looked apocalyptic. There were downed trees, downed powerlines. It was awful.”

These catastrophic conditions have been confirmed to be responsible for the deaths of 87 people throughout the U.S. Fatalities have been linked to cold exposure, vehicle accidents, and cardiac emergencies. This includes one man who was found dead because of cold exposure on Wednesday, Jan. 28, in downtown Providence.

As of now, the snow, the cold, and the destruction linger, as people struggle to recover from the impacts of the historic freeze that struck North America last week.

by Clara Johnson ’26 on January 22, 2026

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Portfolio - Prose

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A Fragment of a Memory

I must have been a little thing to be so tangled in my mom’s arms. I must have been so small.
It is night. We rock back and forth in the blue rocking chair in the corner of the dark room. Shadowed branches scratch the windows and thunder gurgles, though no rain falls, not yet.
Scritch…Scratch…Rumble
It is night, and the thunder cracks this time, and the branches slam a little harder on the window. I feel the rumble in my throat and my stomach. I let out a little yelp, and my hands clench against the yellow plastic sippy cup.
It is night. It is stormy, but she feels like golden afternoon. She pulls me closer to her. She smells like old books and cinnamon tea. She smells like hot chocolate in my yellow plastic sippy cup. I must have been so small to be tangled in her ringlets.
It is night, and she does not sing. She does not sing except for one song every night. A single, listless note, high and sweet to drown out the storm
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
Mama, what happened?

My Old Oak Tree

Weathered and tethered we return to the fields in the woods behind my parents’ house where once my bare feet squelched on soggy earth.
Where once there was a gateway to a deciduous world abounding in the hazy ecstasy of wonder which twisted through the stalwart poplars. That haze which entangled with the wildflowers at their base. Where once fairies wound flowers through my hair and daylight danced and flecked over the woods. Where once, we were warriors and mermaids and mages.
Where once, the oak tree stood.
But now we return, my sister and I, taller and with backs more rigid.
The wind whispers through the wooden squadron and softens their fragility into gentleness like mother’s arms, swaying and waving and staying. Like mother’s arms wrapped around you in the old blue rocking chair, smelling like cinnamon and paper. The wind like mother’s voice,
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
Early in the morning, when the sun is still peaking and glancing, the dawn creaks, and the old mingles with the dawning new. The crickets croak on, and night owls still croon, and the moon holds steady above. But the sun haloes the horizon, and the morning doves chirp too, and mingle with the night sounds.
Everything is cast in gold or maybe silver, cast in the surreal light of almost.
So we return, my sister and I, to collect wildflowers from the fields in the woods behind our house.
Behind our old house.
We sink our feet into the earth like yesterday and tread over leaves dried and fallen, their crunch softened to a rustle by the fall of early spring rains. It smells like rain too, like rain on the earth. What is that smell? Someone told me once it’s bacteria in the soil that the rain coaxes or wrenches into the air, but someone else told me it’s the blood of god defused—how different are those things anyway? Wildflowers peak through the rotting leaves, which smell like bacteria or maybe god. They press on, undaunted by the decay, the winsome smell of almost. We will put the wildflowers in glass bottles of my favorite peach tea and press them in thin pages of my mother’s Bible to capture them, in the moment between.
How long can we stay here between, before the sun crests and the wildflowers die?
How long can we stay here…before we have to move?
How long do you think?
How long?

by Max Gilman '25 on March 2, 2023
Portfolio Co-Editor

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Portfolio

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 Heat screams with no place to hide,

   Spewing, steaming, pushing, stewing—

             Stirring beneath stretching ceiling tiles,

            I listen because I am willing,

                 Whining through ear holes

  Like exhalation,

                   smoke travels

               thoughts linger

               fogging.

       I used to tell her I would be unbreakable when I got older.

And I’ll never again comprehend

what the hell that word ever meant to me,

pride-protection-value-identity-projection?—

Like metal.

My mother sits by the train window

my hands sit by the legs 

waiting for a tacking,

a buzzing will tell my thigh the head

is happy— a mere vibration.

The clawing on the other side of the wall,

pretending ears full,

fingers like a drenched rat—

when I make eye contact for the second time 

with the same pair of glasses three seats down.

On train, bathroom is escape, if needed.

the clearest reflection ever seen 

is a mirror coated in dirt, cracked several ways down the middle.

But train freedom—

 is the last thrill, entering wind like a bird.

mother was never meant for the prior,

on a train, for no destination.

The gale will guide her.

unbreakable like the sky;

the lie of the train, time,

the line of the yarn ball tangled beneath the steel wheel,

and nothing on a train lasts more than hours,

days, and strangers with lives that die in your mind

days after the trip.

Her and I never talk about the things we care about

Or maybe it’s I who avoids those things,

In the silence of a train bathroom

You can hear the world complicate,

Vibrating the bumpy tracks beneath,

And authority becomes you and the nothingness 

Because derailization could be death,

But still never tell her the things I care for.

by The Cowl Editor on October 21, 2021

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Portfolio

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by Taylor Maguire ’24

 

The walls of the wooden cabin shuttered as if the ghost of Halloween’s past drifted through it. Everyone else inhibiting the lodge fell into a deep hushed tone out of fear that any loudly exchanged words would cause us all to be consumed by snow. The wall by the kitchen of the lodge was lined with various postcards from America, and there was a record player in the corner that quietly played Frank Sinatra songs. I sat in the corner alone, beside the window, watching layers of snowflakes fall with an old copy of Little Women I had discovered in the library around the corner.  

Avery suddenly appeared at the bottom of the staircase. Avery was my best friend from college. We met in a Greek Classics class where the two of us would make fun of the statues we read about in Art History books. He walked over in his pajamas and curled up on the brown ottoman beside me.  

“You seem worried,” he says.  

“Oh I’m fine, the snow doesn’t scare me,” I reply.  

“You are from Michigan,” he says.  

“You didn’t get snow like this in California?” I ask.  

Avery lets out a chuckle.  

“What does Clyde think of everything?” he asks.  

Clyde is the owner of the lodge where we were staying. He has a long, thick white beard that curls around his face, and a pair of cherub pink apple cheeks. He rents out rooms to travelers for a cheap price, and always makes anyone a cup of chamomile tea with bread and butter. Avery and I have stayed here a little over a week and in that time we have gotten to know Clyde quite well considering travellers typically stay here for two nights tops.  

“Clyde believes it’ll pass, he’s more worried about keeping everyone warm,” I reply, turning a page in my book without really absorbing the words of Louisa May Alcott.  

Clyde comes over and drops an armful of sweaters on the table in front of us. They’re wool and are woven into specific storytelling patterns.  

“Don’t worry my youngest travelers, they’re clean, they belonged to my father years ago,” he says. I picked up the red one with a lion sewn on the front of it and put it over what I was wearing. Avery put on a forest green one that made his eyes appear to sparkle deviously.  

“What was your father’s name?” I ask.  

“Seamus Murphy. He was a fisherman. He left Ireland when he was seventeen and joined a bunch of other rugrat sailors. Met my mother in Switzerland and he built the lodge here with his own two hands for me and my four sisters,” Clyde replies.  

“Clyde, you never mentioned you had sisters,” I say.  

“Oh of course. There was Saoirse, Roisin, Clodagh, and Gracie. We all grew up in this cabin. You know, we were all very close. When we were kids we would run around the field and they would pretend to be fairies and I would play the Tolkien evil shapeshifter known as the Pooka. We were all guided by our fearless leader Roisin who had this wild imagination. Roisin was the one who tucked us in to bed each night and would read us classic American literature before we would fall asleep. She sewed us each stocking caps to wear in the winter, and she even taught me how to tie my shoelaces,” he sighs.  

“I would love to see these female versions of you, Clyde. Where did they disappear to?”  

Avery always had a knack of getting someone to let their guard down. He could get anyone to willingly divulge their buried secrets. It was a talent of his that was very similar to witnessing a car crash. It was too awful to ignore; you couldn’t look away out of fear of missing what would happen next.  

“The dynamic of our relationship didn’t survive the burden of life’s adversities. Shortly after my father died from a heart attack, Gracie wandered off into the woods during a night like this. It destroyed my mother, but Roisin was never the same after Gracie’s disappearance. We stopped frolicking around fields, and began cleaning plates and sweeping floors in between schooling. She left home less than a week after her 18th birthday and I haven’t seen or heard from her since. Saoirse and Clodagh moved with my mother to America where they send me postcards every month or so,” he says.  

“It’s a shame really. For such a beautiful home created through a parent’s love for their children to be abandoned completely in the alps of Switzerland,” Avery says. There’s a hint of suspicion in his voice that rings louder than I believe he intends it to.  

“Beauty can be a misleading facade, Mr. Avery. Besides, if the tragic history of this home had not occured, I wouldn’t meet the strangers of this world like your charming self.”  

“It is funny though that you picked out Little Women to read, Phoebe,” Clyde says, turning to me.  

“How come?” I ask.  

“That was Roisin’s favorite,” he replies. He stands up now.  

“Well, duty calls. If you both get cold, I have some nice long stockings that you can borrow. Will make you look very dashing, Avery,” Clyde says, giving me a wink.  

Clyde blows out a series of candles that linger around nearby tables, leaving the fireplace to serve as our only source of light during the storm.