Excelsior: Floods of laughter, joy, and beauty

Tuesday, March 08, 2022

Floods of laughter, joy, and beauty

The plan was to visit a couple of wetlands this morning looking at birds before meeting friends for lunch in Jackson, but heavy rains all day yesterday left standing water everywhere water can stand, so as I headed west of Circleville this morning to find the Calamus Swamp, I was dubious. I have spare shoes and socks in the car but I'm not a fan of stomping through six inches of muddy water, which I found covering part of the boardwalk that circles the swamp. Fortunately, I also found an older gentleman who has worked for years as a volunteer at the swamp, and he not only showed me a more passable trail around the muddy spots but also walked alongside and told me about the history of the place. Score one for talking to strangers!

Visiting wetlands was an important part of my Spring Break Restore-My-Equilibrium tour. Last week when I heard some of my students talking about how much they were looking forward to going to Florida for Spring Break, I realized how much I'd missed our usual Florida trip over Christmas, with its requisite visit to the beach. There's nothing quite like looking at rolling water to wash the cobwebs out of my head, but I couldn't manage a trip to Florida for break so I resolved to spend some time near a different kind of water.

So Friday when I left campus early, I drove due north on I-77 and reached Zoar Wetland just in time to enjoy a fast-food lunch, minus the iced tea that spilled all over the picnic shelter when I tripped and fell and smashed my knee. But I tried not to focus on the pain: I sat and ate my lunch in the presence of still water and birds (geese! mergansers! red-winged blackbirds!). Mergansers don't care what new outrage is blowing up on campus email and neither did I, or at least that's what I kept telling myself.

All weekend with the grandkids I tried to ignore my work, except for grading a few freshman essays and posting midterm grades, and then I tried to ignore the emails from the student panicking over plagiarism (two cases in one week!) and all the e-mail chains multiplying over campus problems. We went to Sieberling Nature Realm near Akron, where birds will eat seed right out of the grandkids' hands, and on Sunday my daughter and I enjoyed a choir concert in Cleveland in which I could not understand a word of the lyrics (mostly in German) but felt a flood of beauty washing over me.

On Sunday we had lunch out on the deck in gorgeous sunshine, and when a sudden wind gust launched a pile of paper napkins into a whirlwind, we laughed our fool heads off. The wind soon blew in a storm, though, and I drove through downpours on and off Monday.

More laughter at lunch with a friend in Columbus, followed by a visit to the Ohio Craft Museum, where a collection of quilts created by African American women artists flooded my senses with color and joy. Then a little shopping, a little visit to a chocolatier, and a little more driving south of Columbus to Circleville, where I spent a quiet night.

Tomorrow I need to be back in the office to work on preps for next week's classes--and for the Learning in Retirement class I'll be teaching starting next week, an eight-week course, two hours every Tuesday afternoon, in which a bunch of local retirees expect me to introduce them to the history and theory of comedy. I agreed to teach this course back in 2020 but was thwarted by Covid, and now here it is ready to start and I haven't done a blessed thing to prepare.

So if today is my final day to have some fun, I'd better get to it. I visited the Calamus Swamp this morning and I hope to get to Lake Katharine after lunch, although flooding may limit access to some favorite parts. It's not quite a week at the beach, but simply getting away from campus problems and exposing my senses to floods of beauty have worked wonders. And look--no sunburn! (I've got to look on the bright side because the dark side is so unbearably dark.)