A Nice Day

By Lyrica Gee

The air in my dorm is stale. The warm, afternoon sunlight peeking through my blinds is fleeting. Today is not a day to sit inside.  

I walked outside to the swing hanging from the tall tree behind Hoben. I thought back to the week prior when I walked past the swing while on FaceTime with my friend. “I forgot that swing was there.”   

“You should sit on it, then. You need some swinging in your life,” he said. 

It was a fair remark. He’d just finished talking me through a moment of panic about everything compounding on my to-do list. Still, I had too much to work on that night, namely an unfinished paper due the next morning. Plus it was getting too late in the day. It was getting cold. “I’ll save it for a nice day,” I told my friend.  

Thinking back, I smile and drop my backpack and water bottle against the trunk of the tree to sit on the swing, starting the slow back-and-forth movement and feeling the sun on my face as I plug in my earbuds.  

I FaceTime my friend anew as I sit there, letting him know that today is the day I stop to smell the roses. Another of his friends picks up the phone from the passenger seat of his car, greeting me excitedly before turning the phone for us. They are out enjoying the warm weather, too.  

The view from the swing isn’t very inspiring: A busy stoplight beyond the roof of a campus building and a few of the towers from downtown stretch towards the sky in the distance.  

I turn my attention elsewhere, back towards campus as I hit play on a Spotify playlist.  

One girl sits at one of the picnic tables, ignoring the books in front of her in favor of a phone call. Two people on the dormitory’s back porch, their book bags discarded on the cement. Romanticizing college life is easier in seventy degree weather.  

I pick up my bag and start a walk around campus. I turn the volume up as a summer-beat song floods my ears.  

Blankets are spread across the quad with groups of people lay on their bellies, feet kicked up behind them.  

Every table in front of the FAB is taken up, the steps dotted with groups of students and their instrument cases. Likewise, picnic tables and benches by Trowbridge, Hicks, Mandelle, and the chapel are filled, all unique with their own pursuits.  

The same jogger runs by me three times, braving the many hills and stairs of the K campus.  

“‘I almost forgot my sunglasses and thought, ‘oh, that won’t do,’” a pair of women laugh as they pass me on the sidewalk.  

Another duo kicks a hacky sack back and forth.  

A hammock is strung up between two trees. Someone lies back in it with a book in front of their face.  

A few students greet their professor from their picnic blanket as he leaves the nearest building. The prof waves to another familiar face across the street.  

A woman moves by with a baby in a carrier strapped to her chest. She shields the child’s sleeping face from the sun with a thin white blanket.  

A couple with a golden retriever walks across the Red Square. The dog pulls its owners towards the water for a drink. “I wonder if it’s clean,” says the woman. 

“It’s clean enough for her,” the man assures with a laugh.  

I have to stop in the middle of my walk to take off my jacket. A bright red cardinal flits in front of me, landing in a nearby bush whose leaves are beginning to poke out from the dead, brown sticks.  

Spring is coming.