It’s been a while. I’ve missed you.
I’m sitting in a chair from IKEA—with an ottoman, thank you very much—in a carpeted apartment looking out at a maple tree that’s already lost all its leaves. The only other furniture I have is a bed—memory foam, thank you very much—and four lamps, two of which I still haven’t figured out where to put. My end tables are a printer box and the box from one of the lamps. I have a snake plant in a bucket named George, a yoga mat, and today I broke down and bought a programmable coffee maker because I get up at 5:45 am for my job.
The wifi is fast, I have a RAV4 again, and I’m still trying to find a kind of bread that won’t make me sick.
And winter is coming fast.
If I sit in just the right spot, I can watch the sun set past one of the other buildings in this complex. My balcony faces west, and the pinks and oranges are outstanding. The problem is that the sun sets at 5:15 right now and I have to have my eyes closed by 9:45—U.S. high school start times are inhumane. Everything is very flat here, and the other day I passed a car with a sticker that said We Are All Charlie Kirk.
No, sir or madam, we are not.
There turns out to be a role called “travel special education teacher.” You make good money, the contract ends at the end of the school year, and they parachute you into places that are in deep shit and ask you to create structures and then leave. This is exactly the kind of work I love. I’ve never been the person who can settle into the same job for 20 years. I always imagined I could be that person if I tried hard enough, but the truth is I need an end date.
It doesn’t mean I don’t love the kids, the school, or the town—I do. But I’m built for repair work, not permanence. Hand me a stack of overdue IEPs and an impossible scheduling situation and I’ll vibrate with glee. Make me sit through parent-teacher conferences for the rest of eternity and… ugh.
I’ve always moved every two or three years, except when I was married, and the only reason I stayed then was for the stability of everyone around me. And I was good at it—really good. I threw myself into the community-building rituals of being a Midwestern mom. But it was very, very, very hard.
Lately I’ve started thinking of myself as having a border collie brain. It needs to herd things, and it needs to keep moving. You can’t make a border collie sit still unless they’re exhausted. And at the end of the day, I am very, very tired right now.
And weirdly happy.
I went to the Detroit Institute of Arts today. I wandered through the African art exhibit, and I didn’t see anything from Morocco. Morocco is part of Africa. There was some gorgeous work from Valencia in the Islamic art section, but the rest was mostly Iran and Turkey. They were beautiful, but not representative. If you’re going to call something Islamic art, then where’s Indonesia? And anyway—Islam is the religion, not the people. That’s like calling everything else Christian art.
But looking at the calligraphy, I heard the echo of the call to prayer in the deepest parts of my ears, and I was grinning like an idiot. And when I came home I wondered whether I should buy a couch or do a month in Bali.
I’m happy here, and it’s home, but also it’s not home. I’m living in a part of the state where my mother’s and father’s bloodlines intersect within fifteen miles. Some of the people I work with know my cousins. I’m learning that little things I thought were family quirks are actually regional language tics, and somehow the highways here feel braided into my DNA. No one has any money, no one has any time, everything is too expensive, and I’m trying to uphold structures that may not even exist by the end of this school year. Michigan will be fine, but further south—I pray for those kids.
There’s a lot to write about. My Spanish is exceptional now, so Cuenca was worth it for that alone, but I’m not looking forward to the deep freeze of January and February, or the political weirdness that refuses to die. I try not to think about how Stalin starved Ukraine and instead focus on generalizing math skills for kids with IEPs and keeping them out of jail when they take a hit off a vape pen in the middle of gym class.
I missed this, sometimes. I can only handle so many rich kids at once. I’m traveling to two places for Thanksgiving, and I’m eyeing Mexico—not the beach, somewhere with good coffee and very little English—for Christmas break. I’m thinking bigger for Spring Break. Winter here is brutal, and I don’t want to be immobilized under a blanket staring at salt stains on my shoes for two months. I want to remember color and light.
But the hummingbirds by my window are distant now. So are the goats on Sunday mornings, their bells tinkling on the other side of the compound wall. I’m in the land of my people for the coming season, with a lease and a car loan and George.
I’m okay. At least for a while.
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