Writing Between the Lines of My Existence

When I was a teenager, my parents told me not to rush into that first job because I’d be working all my life. But I did anyway. I got a job at a French restaurant, where the owner made passes at the waitresses and cheated the IRS. While a college student, I tutored students in my majors--French and English--and as an usher at the performing arts center, I got to watch half of each show.

After graduating, I fell into a publishing job, one that I continued when my husband and I later moved out of state so he could attend graduate school. As a freelance writer, I wrote articles and edited scientific reports. Then I landed a steadier job as a secretary at the university, first in the agriculture college, later in the Foreign Language Department. I still wrote.

Being a writer allowed me to take my work wherever my family went—and we did. Almost every three years, my husband and I and then a daughter, another daughter, and a son (each child born in a different state) packed up our lives and headed for a new destination. I wrote during naptimes, while nursing the baby, and watching the children play.

Sometimes I dreamed of the day the children would be in school. When it came, I found that I could concentrate my work hours and then enjoy my family in the afternoons and evenings.

Three books and hundreds of articles later, I was ready to get out of the house. Yes, I liked my garden and my loyal springer spaniel, who lounged on the wide ceramic window sill adjacent my desk. Yet--

So, I got a part-time job at a library, where I delivered books and magazines to seventy car-less Amish families. I wrote (about the day my car rolled backward down a drive and into the barbed wire fence enclosing the pasture). I worked as a secretary at a nonprofit historical society. I wrote (about the oldest apple butter festival in the nation).

After yet another move across the country, I went back to school and earned a teaching certificate. For a semester, I tutored foreign students in an international program at a local university. Now I assist in teaching developmental writing at a community college and, of course, I write. I know that the only constant in my life will continue to be the need to write, whatever other work I do.