Today was the day when the last few students – the ones who couldn’t figure out how to take their exams earlier, mostly – went home for Carleton’s long Winter Recess, which runs all the way until January 2. Most of the students won’t be back until January, which will be okay, next week, when the janitors will have had a few days to clean up and, with any luck, we will have some snow to cover the wet, sticky leaves.
Today, though, it was just depressing to see campus empty out. The gray sky and 99% humidity didn’t help, but it was mostly the people. Many faculty and quite a few staff – like the librarians – looked almost as worn out as the students, who were even more haggard and ill-kempt than usual. Even the noontime buzz at the snack bar was subdued – a downer rather than the usual upper. The thousands of just-returned books at the library’s circulation desk looked like flotsam, and the lone student worker who was trying to check them all back in looked like a man lost at sea, or at least an underpaid factotum. My bike missed all the chums that are usually locked to the rack out front of my building.
Perhaps the most significant sign of the shift from full-on Fall Term madness to hollowed-out Winter Recess sedation was the number of couples whom I saw walking around hand-in-hand. For whatever reason – college culture? generational changes? H1N1? – it’s rare to see two students holding hands, but today I saw quite a few couples walking slowly from place to place, staving off the six weeks of separation with a few more minutes of interlocked fingers.