Eli squirms on the ferry, the Captain Neal Burgess
Late last summer, at the end of my three-year quest for full employment, I accepted a job offer to teach school 12 miles out in the middle of Penobscot Bay, on North Haven Island. I left my LittlePinkHouse in Alna, Maine and moved to a lovely summer “cottage” in the village of North Haven, steps from the ferry landing, the community center and the Y. Yes, I said, Y, as in treadmills, stair-steppers, elipticals, rowing machines and excellent cable television.
My profession, teaching high school humanities, and consequent personal changes have taken up all the available air around me for several months. Only in the last few weeks–as often happens with new jobs at the six-month mark–have I been able to feel the ground beneath my feet a bit more. It has taken me this long to find the syncopation in this school’s particular brand of arrhythmia and to work my own pulse into the songs of each day.
I started this blog days before I got my current job, while contemplating ways to make my part-time baking job add up to an actual living. bakerleola is my userid for WordPress because I planned, still plan actually, to sell pies at the local farmers markets in the summer, pies made from ingredients from no more than 100 miles away. The company name will be 100 Mile Pies and so confident was I that this would be a going concern, I bought the domain name 100milepie.com. It’s not live yet, so there’s no point in checking my website. Also, for the deep thinkers out there, try to wrestle that impulse to tell me about the ironies of selling pies made from local ingredients on the World Wide Web into submission.
So, since I don’t know what is happening with my LittlePinkHouse, my LittleBlondHorse, or this blog, I am at a loss for how to use this space just now. I have a blog already that grew out of my annoyance with my former employer the Lincoln County News and morphed into a place to post everything from graduate school papers to teevee boyfriend crushes. What possible category could that space leave out? Good thing my lesson of the last six months has been that I don’t have to know. Yet.
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