Florida, Oddly Enough

 Naples Jacarsnda trees are very old, and twisty. Their flame like blooms are very striking against their dark gray trunks and bright green foliage, the blue sky. It’s a small thrill to walk under their gorgeous heavy boughs this time of year. 

It’s the end of a school year. I finished grading a little early this year, a relief.  And even before the horrible mass shooting in Texas, I have been thinking about whether or not I want to stay in education.  I don’t have conscious fears of being in a school shooter incident, it’s not that. It’s a feeling that the work is so tangled up in federal and state regulations and corporate models that it is very far removed from what I would like to do each day with students. It’s frustrating. 

I have been wondering how I would make a living if I weren’t teaching. And you might wonder why even bother. I’m technically at retirement age, 64. But I’d planned to work until age 67. Three more years. But lately I’ve been feeling like my job is an uphill climb, constantly. I felt my heart simultaneously breaking and hardening this year.  It feels weird and I don’t know what to do about it. I’m tired of it. Spinning around in my brain, I’ve begun to think about other sources of income if I get to a breaking point. If I were younger, I’d like to do interior design. I would enjoy putting rooms togther, finding things people want to live around. Eh, but I wouldn’t want to go back to school. More appropriately, I’d like teaching ESOL at a community college. Maybe. Maybe I could somehow finagle a tugboat operating job. Or even work with some other fed up teachers to start a charter school, but lord that would be extremely tiring. It doesn’t sound appealing, all that dealing with government entities.  Ugh.  

Art by Victor P - 2nd grade

So I started a list. What am I good at? Well, sometimes when I’m enthusiastic about something people listen to me and also become enthusiastic, so maybe I could find something at least profitable and worthwhile to sell. I like checking things over, looking for patterns, quality control. I should research other types of jobs people with my degrees might have. But in reality, to top off all that daydreaming, what I’d really like to do is be retired, so I could plant a garden, read, write, and ramble all day. Watch the world turn. With all that’s happening in the world, who knows?  We are in dire straits. Anything and everything might change right before our eyes.