Things Can Never Be As Bad As They Were

Today ended my first semester teaching as faculty. I have an office, with posted office hours, and my name on a sign outside the door. I have a department secretary who will perform copying and collating for me; she even staples. I have meetings with other faculty once a week where we eat our lunch (all drinking La Croix) and discuss current literature on the topic of composition and rhetoric for first-year students.

I'm learning that I could make it happen anywhere I go. Columbus, Georgia looks and feels so abandoned, by God and history and industry. However, I've slowly seen a brilliant bird's egg nestled in the rubble. Like, the non-profit organization that helps put local businesses into abandoned buildings. Like, the English department with their poetry readings in an historic house once belonging to a star of Southern literature. Like, the neighborhood of re-gentrified bungalow houses. All laying dormant, incubated, and waiting to hatch like a Phoenix.

My boss - the First Year Writing Program Administrator - just popped in to my office and made sure I had received the information about the full-time position coming available, for which they are hiring from within. There's a tangent of thought spinning where we purchase an old house, I teach full time, and we build a community that needs to be re-built. We could feasibly stay here and make a life!

But staying here is not the point, specifically. It is the fact that wherever we go, I'm not just "biding my time." I'm not just an Army wife following my husband's career. I'm involved, and contributing. This is the only way to survive. I must be wherever I am one-hundred percent, until I'm not there anymore. Then I can leave.