Licking the Windows

One year Mr. Billy, my pale, soft-spoken middle school bus driver, won the lottery. He then decisively answered the age-old question by using his winnings to purchase, of all things, a new school bus. He also bought - or perhaps simply expanded upon - a collection of emerald and burgundy velour tracksuits for crisp shoulder-season mornings. Despite our driver’s extraordinary stroke of luck and updated wardrobe, our lives proceeded mostly as usual. The only significant change that registered in our small preteen minds was that we could no longer lick the windows of the bus, because it was now Mr. Billy’s personal property and therefore he cared quite a lot about semi-permanent sticky substances like snot and saliva. At the time, I didn’t understand why my parents thought the lottery story’s dinner table retelling was so funny. It has taken me years to realize that Mr. Billy could have done anything with the money, but instead he simply carried on. I think about him a lot these days.

I recently shoved my surfboard once more into the yawning mouth of my hatchback and drove from my one-horse town in Maine to a rowhouse in the heart of Baltimore. That same week, I started a new writing and photography job and, with it, received my first ever professional email address - a frightful thing for a girl whose main form of occupational communication has either been 1) a walkie-talkie, or 2) hollering across a barn. I’ve moved cross-country several times, but this round felt entirely new. It’s one thing to transition from a limestone island in Florida to a blueschist version in California; it’s a different beast to trade country roads, sand, and dairy goats for parallel parking, sirens, and purple-clad pedestrians at every turn. Needless to say, I’m not doing particularly well. The constant noise is grating, I’m anxious when I drive, and, after being spoiled rotten on our country’s most beautiful coastlines, I crave the ocean deeply. I miss watching the whitecaps roll in from shore, bundled in a blanket, resting with the mist that waits just above the water. I miss the feeling of being enveloped within an ancient entity, floating through a sparkling bioluminescent galaxy in the dead of night or paddling hard for an early-morning wave. I miss the way the soft blue expands into oblivion, so unlike the unforgiving concrete and brick of the city. I feel that there is a piece of me that’s been left behind in the most remote of the places I’ve lived, and I long to be back on the outskirts. I have a hole in my chest.

And yet I have also found unexpected grace and comedy in city life. I have watched a man determinedly sweeping his front lawn with a kitchen broom, spotted naked people at the bus stop, and realized that my next-door neighbors may not have a fully traditional marriage (they thought they had the rooftop to themselves). I have run into acquaintances on the street, chatted with old ladies in public gardens, pushed a 73-year-old dresser up two narrow flights of stairs, and gotten a library card. I enthusiastically discard my personal belongings into a “free” box on my doorstep and have, on my daily walks, scored a yoga mat, a ski bag, a teapot, a rainbow set of mixing bowls, and an 1880 print of the mustachioed, jousting British Army in return. I am no longer afraid to take up space when parallel parking or ordering across a crowded countertop. I see some of my favorite humans every single day. I can feel deep down that city life isn’t for me, but it has surely supplied me with enough people-watching fodder to last a lifetime. I find it ridiculous in a lovely sort of way, like any half-decent family reunion.

I am torn between turning up the volume on my gut, which is urging me to get out, back to the sea, back to the mountains and the spruce and the wintergreen, and waiting it out for fairer weather. Do I pack up and walk away, or do I gift myself more of an adjustment window? Give it up or grind it out? After all, if we trashed the batter after the inaugural splotchy pancake (why is it that the first of the batch is always the worst?), we’d never get to smother its glorious followers in butter and sugar. Then again, I don’t want to look down at my work laptop some dreary Baltimore afternoon and find that I’ve been devotedly rendering an All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy remix. 

The upside, though, is that I’ve come to believe that there is no urgency in my decision-making. After yoga class yesterday evening, my instructor told us during our cool-down to simply let ourselves be. She wanted us to relax our shoulders and listen to our breath condense against the sticky mat, but instead I felt a deep-down recognition in my bones. We had a saying at my old backpacking outfitter - be where your feet are. At the end of the day, I’m doing just fine, and I’m pretty darn lucky to have the option to leave if I’m not. Decisions like this feel daunting, but I know now that perfect choices don’t exist. Every distant trail will have hills, valleys, and mostly just in-betweens, and that’s okay. Bears and bats wait out the cold. Shrubbery drops its leaves, and fish enter a deep sleep. Eddies swirl in the water. It’s enough to just be.

Lately another memory of Mr. Billy has returned to the fuzzy edges of my consciousness: after his big win, along with the new bus and the tracksuits, our driver bought us pizza every Friday without fail. To repeatedly serve those thin, greasy squares to children that screamed and rubbed their tongues and fingers on your windows and rarely even said thank-you is a brave, selfless, shocking thing to do. We didn’t deserve him. I now realize that he took a significant life change in stride, adjusted his behavior by a modest amount, and made sure he took care of those around him.

Whether I ultimately choose to stay or go, I will first settle into this noisy season of life, learn what I can, and make sure that my people (and how many I have, and so close together!) feel loved. If only they would stop licking the windows of my bus.

On a work assignment this fall.