Summertime.
I don’t think the season has ever had more meaning for me than it has this year. My sunflowers are blooming across the back of the old barn like cheerful soldiers in a Disney cartoon, their heads bobbing in the vaguest of breezes, listening to music never heard in town.
The mockingbirds and redwinged blackbirds are staging their own Bonnaroo in the front yard and the does make their daily pilgrimage across the neighbor’s front yard, pausing and posing like visiting royalty.
Me?
I’m breathing.
I’m sitting on the front porch with my eyes closed and I’m letting the hot air wrap me up and hold me. Everything tastes better, feels better, looks better, and smells better, which is amazing when you live next to a cattle farm and a just-manured corn field.
Everything is better.
You see, I lost a summer last year. Most of it was spent in the chilly, sterile box of a hospital room, the clouded blur of medication adjustment, or the bitter darkness of anger and betrayal. I don’t remember much of last summer at all, and of what I do remember, most of it I wish I could forget.
Isn’t it amazing how nine short months can change your life? In nine months, a brief, pleasurable act creates a human being. In nine months, another year of education is crammed away into backpacks along with candy wrappers, mangled notebooks and that library book you forgot to turn in.
In nine months, a life can change.
For the first time in my post-college life, I’m not working for a newspaper or trying to work for a newspaper. For the first time, I have a regular job with regular hours, a strict time clock, a cool, clean work environment and decent benefits. I’m a call service rep for a company that provides fare cards for mass transit agencies in San Francisco and oddly enough, it’s the perfect job for me.
People call in to find out why their cards aren’t working and I have to figure it out, then write up an incident report. In other words, I’m getting paid to talk on the phone, be nosy, do logic puzzles, and make an incident out of everything. What could be better than that?
Best of all, my boss is fair and encouraging – what a concept.
I do miss my life at the Times-Gazette. I miss John and thank heaven for Facebook everyday so I can keep up with him. I miss talking to my guy, Ike Farrar, who did call me to check on me a few months ago. I miss being able to help people with their plays, projects, fundraisers and such.
What I don’t miss is the meanness. It tainted last summer, a carrion scent at a picnic.
Coming out of that post-suicidal fugue has been gradual and even on bright sunny days like today, I can feel the gray tendrils reaching for me, but these days, I’m much better at ignoring them. Nine months have taught me what is worth worrying over and what isn’t. Who my loved ones truly are – and aren’t.
Best off all, I get to write what I want to write now, and coming home to a blank computer screen after churning out glorified ad copy no longer seems like a busman’s holiday.
Everyday seems like a real holiday – summer vacation for the rest of my life, and it’s only just beginning.
marymothermayhem 