Today is Monday. There are boxes and hot pink discount bins all over my room. I have gathered about a pound of blond hair from various corners of the room and realized once again that I have a book hoarding problem. I am packing, or clearing out, of my bedroom in Austin. Thursday I will get on a plane to Colorado, then Friday I will get back on a plane with sister, toddler, and bun (-in oven) to make our way to the West Coast. I will be gone two months. Eight weeks. Sixty days. I think about the days, as though each were dangling above me on a clothespin, and wonder which to pluck off first. I think many things, on my duvet-cover now stained with pizza sauce; it's just been one of those weekends.
Where to begin? Just thinking about this time last year, when I arrived sweating and enthralled by the downtown city lights of Austin and was just a little disappointed not to hear accents, I find myself getting that strange feeling of time lost. Has it been a year? Have I really taught as a middle school teacher and created a family with a bunch of smelly but darling twelve-year-old adolescents? The answer is, but of course, a resounding yes (especially the smelly part, as I learned this year the Spanish word for fart is 'pedo' and I have learned to move away quickly upon hearing it). I took so many pictures of my babies during our UT field trip that I almost scratched the lens with my clucking.
Now, a new TTF person is coming to live in my room for the summer. She keeps asking me all of these adorably naive questions and I don't have the heart to tell her just how ruthless it is out there to be a teacher. I want her to keep her faith, to think that she is different, because everyone deserves that. I just can't help but think of how much has changed since I did summer institute last year. I hadn't met Heather, my dearest Austin love, who has turned so many of my tears into bouncy bowls of laughter that I don't know what I would have done without her. She is like a fellow potato, that happened to grow up on a distant island, but we have the same tough kind of roots. We have gushed and bitched about all the parts of work or life that are possible with verbal communication, and beyond that, we've done a ridiculous number of hand gestures.
I also met a lovely man, who I had a movie-sized goodbye with on my porch when it was still sticky at 3am. I watched him, half ready to cry and half ready to be alone, get in his truck and drive away. He will be in China all summer while I gallivant the U.S. with no real agenda except letting myself be surprised over and over again.
I also have a new house. There is the cutest dwelling waiting for me August 1st, and I am giddy with anticipation to scoop and shlep all of my shit into it and nest like the feathery and particular bird that I am. The trees make this canopy above the roof and....sigh.....see how I lose focus so quickly? OK, so, I have made great friends and have a job that fulfills me in all those scary little pockets of soul that you were afraid may grow over with cobwebs but now, instead, the light pours into it and you think it may be a nice spot to paint after all. I like to think back to last May, about how nervous I was, how my hands shook when I threw those dice in California, betting that a life in Texas would maybe, just maybe, be that thing that my newly mid-twenty self was secretly trying to grab hold of. And, I think I may be bruised, but I still hold it, in my balmy hands.
This summer will not be a break, not in the truest sense. Though I can and will devour books like female teachers with free cupcakes, I vow that I will finish MY book. I mean, here I have been given over two months of undisturbed, child-free existence and if I were to throw it away on wheat beer and floating devices what kind of human would I be? Well, a chubby and well-tanned one, certainly, but I want to be more. Besides, didn't that seven months in Thailand remind me it is actually impossible for me to get any real kind of color? So, I will go to coffee shops and spend time in the bedroom I grew up in so as to restore that hidden well-water within me that sometimes, my arms don't have the strength to draw from. I want to go back to them, drink from them, baptize myself in each drop and remember that the whole point of my book is to make people feel like there is more to this world, more to themselves, than what they have ever dreamed.
Simple, right?? Well, we will see. I will still be blogging about all the mini-trips I go on and attempting to document the tornado of emotions that I usually smack into when returning to Chico. Hopefully people have developed some kind shelter for my arrivals, as I tend to not know I destroy as much as I do.
But it is a good thing to leave a place. It is a good thing to miss and be missed. It is good to look upon a time and know it is gone but still pointing your little feet toward the road because, at least you know you're going somewhere. So, here's to the brave souls who have picked my hitchhiking butt up throughout my life, loaded in me in their cars and helped me get somewhere amazing. I know there will be more to meet, and I love to stick my legs up on the dash and hear the world sing.
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