Settling In

In the mornings, fog covers the hills and a smell covers the ground.  A particularly blunt grad student describes it in the same breath as urine and sulphur, but neither of these quite capture it.  One of our orientation speakers explains that it comes across the river from a plant in West Virginia.  The odor and the fog have burned off by nine or ten and (at least on weekdays) the campus has come alive.

Made-up girls in skirts and flip-flops and clean-cut guys in polo shirts amble to their destination, normally one of the two academic buildings or the two-floor library.  They stop and chat with friends on the pathways, because on a campus this size, you can't help but run into someone you know.  Some people wear their marks of loyalty in the form of t-shirts that claim Household allegiance: Greek life meets intentional community.

Inside the buildings, doorways and hallways catch and clog as students stop to mingle, buy drinks, and chat.  Guys have a tendency to hold doors and send women through doorways first, a touching display of chivalry that doesn't help the traffic flow.  A surprising minority of men carry a breviary or another prayer book, a material testimony to that morning's activities.  An unsurprising number of wrists, necks, and fingers support scapulars, rosaries, and crucifixes.  These tools of prayer apparently get good use :  there is no place to pray hidden and alone here, where sacred places attract crowds at all hours of the day and into the night.

Religious habits speckle the ranks of students and faculty and Roman collars pop up more frequently than spaghetti straps, even when the temperature springs into the 90s.  Those men and women who wear their order rarely walk or stand alone.  They appear to be in constant conversation with students, conversations governed at times by gravity and at times by levity.

This is the place that somehow, someone has seem fit to drop me for the next two years.  Part school, part Catholic Disneyland; a city on a hill in the middle of nowhere in depressed Ohio... The place in which I will learn and grow and discern God's dreams for me.