Meandering away from anxiety

All week I've been studiously avoiding all thoughts of campus, but my subconscious won't give me a break--last night it served up an anxiety dream in which I forgot to teach my freshman comp class all semester and then had to scramble to squeeze in all the work in the final week of classes. Ridiculous, of course, especially since I didn't teach composition at all this past academic year. Maybe somewhere deep in my soul there's a tiny piece of me that misses teaching composition, but giving me nightmares isn't the best way to win me over.

Next week I need to get my mind back on campus tasks, but this week I've been trying to focus on other things. Mowing, for instance, and getting my new phone and internet service set up, and then marveling over the fact that for the first time in 20 years we have both high-speed internet service at home and a landline that's not full of static. We can call people! On the phone! Without having to scream what?! into the receiver over and over! For years I've done all our online banking from campus because our home internet was too cranky to keep me connected, but now I can pay my bills at home! And if I need to remind myself of the differences between grasshopper sparrows and Henslow's sparrows, I can Google it and get an answer right away! I mean, it's as if we've finally entered the twenty-first century, a few decades late.

But I won't be at home to play with my new technology for a few days. This morning I took a meandering drive north to visit the grandkids, and along the way I accomplished a few other non-campus-related goals. I started by visiting the birding area at The Wilds, where I saw grasshopper sparrows at exactly the same spot I've seen them before, plus killdeer and tree swallows and brown thrashers and yellow warblers and towhees and robins and turkey vultures and common yellowthroats and I don't know what else. The fog was too thick to allow good photos, but I exulted in the stillness suffused with birdsong.

And then I meandered my way on over to Amish country, which has grown more touristy since last time I visited. I've been hunting for a desk for months, an essential part of my pre-retirement plan. I'll remove the big empty dresser from the guest room, put a computer desk in there, and finally buy my own computer with a big screen so I don't have to kill my eyes with a tiny laptop screen after I finally surrender my college-owned laptop. But I refuse to buy any more furniture that comes in a flat box and they won't let me steal Edith Wharton's desk from The Mount, so for months I've been actively seeking a desk at furniture stores between Charleston and Columbus. Everything is either too massive or too elaborate or too simple or too ugly, a trend that continued today as I hopped in and out of Amish furniture stores in the bustling tourist towns of Sugar Creek, Millersburg, and Wooster. It looks as if the allure of Amish-made furniture has resulted in a burgeoning market for cheap imitations, so I kept being disappointed until I stopped at a tiny store near Orrville just down the road from the Smucker's factory. There I found my desk, and I even managed to squeeze it into the back of my car. 

Now it's time to focus on the task at hand: fun with the grandkids. If their hijinks can't banish campus anxiety from my thoughts, nothing can. What new wonders will they bring into my life? Only time will tell.