It was rainy and chilly and for some reason I was carrying my umbrella under my jacket like a sword, gripping the handle in case the gray-cast skies decided to ruin my day and pour.

This was not how spring break was supposed to happen.

College visits are pretty much the norm for a spring break when you’re a junior, meaning that instead of going to some nice resort, you tromp around campuses and hope to like what you see. I had started my (minorly) epic trek in Chicago, with a quick detour to see the family, and now I was in Ohio, hoping to God that it wouldn’t rain on the little town of Oberlin.

The skies, stormy and dark, seemed to think otherwise. I had a feeling my prayers were going to be futile.

Don’t get me wrong. The countryside that surrounds Oberlin is lovely, and the campus of the college itself is huge and vast and green. After that phase in my childhood during which, not uncommonly, I had insisted that I was going to go to Wash U and live at home, I had since decided that I was getting out of the state of Missouri.

So I was faintly annoyed when every town I passed looked like an imprint of South County, each with its own McDonald’s and Applebees and the like. What was the point of going so far away from home when every place you went looked just like St. Louis?

At that moment, I had never more abhorred chain establishments. After the tour at Oberlin ended, I went to the small downtown area, hoping to find some nice unique place to eat. I ended up at a Subway, all the while thinking that I could have gone anywhere for a meatball sandwich.

And as I was walking back to the car, I noticed something. A yarn shop. In the middle of Oberlin. In the middle of nowhere.

The plain exterior belied the lush selection inside. A little old man sat at the register; an old woman rearranged skeins of wool on a nearby shelf, watching me as I admired a display of Malabrigo.

“It just came in,” the man said. “Pretty, eh?” He told me he wished more collegegoers would come in. I was surprised—Oberlin is known for its arts, after all.

As we made a little more small talk, I began to relax. This was not a talk about college, or admissions, or classes. Here was a place where I could escape it all for a little while.

I remembered that my six-year-old cousin back in Chicago had asked me what a college visit was, and I, being the kind older cousin, had tried to make it sound as fun as possible. Of course, I knew the campuses were going to be largely deserted due to spring break, and that it was going to be cold, possibly rainy. This was true.

But I had always thought of college tours as excursions, where you took a look at the interesting architecture and examined the libraries and the town near the campus and tried to imagine yourself there. They were supposed to be insights into your own person, a way to explore one’s own personality.

Well, sure. Here it was. As I walked out of the store, two of the sapphire skeins in a bag, I could feel what had been stifled in the long days of college tours and dry information revitalize. My feet, which had been aching, felt like they could maybe take on another giant tour or two, or maybe a marathon. I had had yarn as therapy. Who knew?

It didn’t rain that day.