Learning to love everything from windmills to black swans

When I visited Ohio Northern University last fall, I remember thinking that the campus was boring. I’m from a historic suburb filled with hills, trees and old brick roads, which rests behind a city.

On top of that, I have also spent countless hours over the last ten years traveling to different camps in the midwest. After seeing a tiring amount of windmill-dominated fields, I had come to the conclusion that I could never live in the rural midwest.

But it’s funny how differently you look at things once they become yours, or a part of your home.

Now I can’t get over how beautiful Northern’s campus is (although, in reality, it’ll only be a month or so before it starts blizzarding again).

I embrace the windmills, the surrounding soy fields, the tundra and even the wildlife, which was something that I seriously underestimated before I came here.

Northern’s pond ecosystem makes things more interesting. The black swans are ferocious birds that will make you rethink stepping on their side of the pond. I had never seen black squirrels before I came to ONU, and they’re everywhere here. As an anonymous student said on the social app Yik Yak, ‘the black squirrel with no tail hangs out near the law building. Really pulling for him.’

Other features of ONU’s entertaining ecosystem include the vulture-looking birds that perch on the roof of one of the fraternities near the mud volleyball courts. They are large and reckless. Not to mention the frogs that seem to appear every so often, and the ducks that never fly alone.

Now that Northern is becoming my home, I am starting to love so many of the things that I never thought I would. It will be hard to see the animals go when the campus freezes over soon, but I’ll learn to deal with it.