I remember my first time taking the bus in Oxford. It was August 2024, about a week before the semester started. While I was still trying to figure out the area, the bus routes (Oxford used to have buses at 6 p.m., and you didn’t need to wait 86 minutes for a bus) and my new routine, I found myself quietly enjoying the short, random conversations happening around me.
As a graduate student, I usually just observed ; a lonely student who sat alone in the dining hall during the first week of the fall semester. But for the first time, the driver actually looked at me and asked, “Are you new?”
“Yes, I am,” I said, trying to sound confident. A small smile appeared on his face, the kind of smile people give in only two situations: when their football team wins or when they win the lottery. A few poor souls out there won’t experience either (God bless their hearts).
The bus driver confessed how much he loved chatting with new students and how sad he felt when the holidays came around. “The town gets so empty,” he sighed. His point of view surprised me. Who misses the sight of scattered cups and crushed beer cans around town? Who looks at that and says, “Ah yes, I’ll miss this chaos”?
But … I get it.
I remember finishing my first semester at Miami and watching the campus slowly turn into a desert–no students, no one jogging at twilight and no one walking their dogs. I get why it affects the people who never leave town. Oxford is part of who they are. For students this is temporary; for others, this is home.
Still, I have to admit: I love when the students are gone.
There’s no escape for me–I have to stay–but it’s so much nicer when there are actual parking spots, fewer students staring at me like I just landed from another planet, and no one sprinting to class like it’s an Olympic event. The campus becomes something else entirely: a quiet new land I can rediscover every day.
No, no … it’s not like I come to campus every day during summer break. But I do enjoy watching it slow down, stretch out, and finally let the sun have some room to shine (when Ohio remembers sun exists).
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