Campus update for March 23

 March 23, 2020

Dear students,

The overnight snow is melting fast but it was beautiful while it lasted. Campus is quiet now that most of you have returned home. (For those of you remaining, here is some new information about dining.)

If you have sent a question to covid19info@augustana.edu and we haven't answered yet, we will! Still tracking down info on how to retrieve mail, return books and more. 

What we do know today

• Housing: If you haven't returned your key and moved out, please login to housing.augustana.edu. Select "Applications and Forms" then "Spring 2020." Use that form to indicate that you are planning to remain on campus, OR that you have left things in your room and will pick them up at a later time.

If you are leaving things in the room and moving out later, you will still receive your refund. After the Illinois stay-at-home order is lifted, we will begin scheduling move-out appointments again.

• The Tredway Library is closed, but its digital resources are available. For more info, contact the circulation desk.

• The peer mentor application deadline has been extended to March 30. Here's your chance to welcome and assist new students this fall.

• Campus Cupboard is open until 2 p.m. today. Pre-made bags will be left in the hallway, Olin third floor. 

Treats!

Augustana Officer Kylee Ross reveals a musical talent in the video she shared over the weekend, and Dining's Beth Melton is handing out the Augie chocolate chip cookie recipe, just in case you are interested :).

Augustana epidemiologist: Just the facts

Augustana’s Dr. Rebecca Heick is an epidemiologist and assistant professor of public health. She never imagined she would become a regularly scheduled media spokesperson during a major public health issue. (more)

Stay in touch, a message from Chaplain Richard Priggie

The nightly news reports that almost all Italians overcome by coronavirus are dying alone; passing on infection to visitors cannot be risked.

This is immensely sad, it seems to me. Imagine that those who are dying are all parents and grandparents; they are daughters and sons, siblings or best friends. They have longstanding, dear relationships, they all do. Each one is precious in God's eyes.

Allowing ourselves to grieve, to be sad at their loss, honors them. Our grieving singles them out as individuals. They will be missed, deeply, as in this poem, “The Oak Tree at the Entrance to Blackwater Pond,” by Mary Oliver:

Every day on my way to the pond
I pass the lightning-felled,
chesty, hundred-fingered, black oak
which, summers ago,
swam forward when the storm laid one lean yellow wand against it,
smoking it open to its rosy heart.
It dropped down in a veil of rain, in a cloud of sap and fire,
and became what it has been ever since--
a black boat floating in the tossing leaves of summer,
like the coffin of Osiris, descending up the cloudy Nile.

But listen, I'm tired of that brazen promise: death and resurrection.
I'm tired of hearing how the nitrogens will return to the earth again,
through the hinterland of patience--
how the mushrooms and the yeasts will arrive in the wind--
how they'll anchor the pearls of their bodies and begin
to gnaw through the darkness like wolves at bones--

What I loved, I mean, was that tree--
tree of the moment-- tree of my own sad, mortal heart--
and I don't want to sing anymore of the way
Osiris came home at last, on a clean and powerful ship,
over the dangerous sea,
as a tall and beautiful stranger.

  Pastor Richard W. Priggie
309-794-7478 

Please send comments, questions or suggestions to covid19info@augustana.edu.