On parkas and people

Weather here has been truly gloomy. Cold rain and gray skies. Neither of which bode well for playgrounds, which is where you can maintain your sanity while working in a kindergarten. Without outdoor playtime cabin fever can become a truly terrifying thing.

I typed up a long post the other day and turned it into an e-mail instead. The jist of it was that after a Fall and Winter of living in my trunk in Douglasville I wore my parka for two days straight here. Well that was the less substantial jist. The other was about the appreciation for proximity and personal face-to-face contact and how I try (and seem to generally succeed at) appreciating what I missed for a year while living in the woods. Even this morning as I woke up in my room and thought about my day ahead I found pieces of relief that I would see people today that I knew. I could watch football for free instead of for the price of chips and salsa (sorry Taco Mac). My dog would be waiting on my couch and the NY Times Style section would be ready for my reading. I wouldn't have to brave the elements to get to where the coffee was. These are all the stuff of Sundays in NJ, they have been for a while. But maybe it took a year of some brutally lonely weekends for that appreciation to sink in.

Okay so the e-mailed version of this post focused on a person and not a day of the week. But that's why it was e-mailed.

On Friday night as I drove the almost-hour north to spend the night I listened to a CD Sterling made me last winter. Aside from "Someday I'll Be A Farmer" which I will always always always associate with Americorps people, there were songs that mostly reminded me of driving around the circle of Hartsfield Jackson and parking in the occasionally suspiciously empty parking deck. It was such a visceral memory, of the antsy waiting that I used to do, sitting in the hard chairs, moving from them to the crush of people all trying to outmaneuver the cordoned-off barriers to see the arriving passengers. It was once a month that I did this (give or take the ones where I flew or drove north) and now it's once or twice a week that I drive there. I hope I never forget or let slip away the feelings of appreciation that I have for all this time now.

But missing people goes both ways. And listening to other songs on the CD make me picture a trailer for a movie about the past year. I see mulch. I see the land on the trail before the bridge was made. I see gray sweatshirts and the kind of smiles that are genuine but that actors also do really well in movie trailers. Weekends were lonely and nights were too. But workdays were so shared that it's hard to imagine ever being closer with coworkers. I guess the difference between missing someone and some things from home is that when you go back there are some beautiful feelings and things that haven't changed. But going back to the past year is pretty impossible. A year-long commitment where almost everyone convenes and then dismisses can't be recreated or revived. If I went back to IH now it would be full of people who aren't the same as the ones I shared life and times with. Which makes nostalgia and missing people complicated, but somehow easier. I don't have those painful feelings that life back there is going on without me. Because technically it's going on without "us". And that's a much less isolating feeling.

November is National Novel Writing Month. I can't decide if that's an easier or more difficult month to participate in than No Processed Foods November. I mean, Thanksgiving is in November. And some of my favorite Thanksgiving foods are processed (I'm looking at you green bean casserole). Additionally the past year has provided more fodder for a novel than most people get in a decade.

We'll see.