I drafted the following post at the beginning of summer to make grand announcements about how amazing my summer was going to be, and it was. I got so busy with said summer so quickly that I never finished and posted it. I considered posting it at the end of the summer as a reflection piece, and just as quickly returned to my full time job and just never posted. I got inspired to draft another post today and thought this might be good to start with to fill in the gaps of what has become a long absence, not just here, but via my social media channels, as well. So here’s what I’ve been up to for the last year or so. Pardon the abrupt ending, I wasn’t moved to make any further additions or changes since July, save adding a few proof of summer photos:

Summer of Soil and Solidarity

Call it a sabbatical, if you will. Call it a summer vacation, because I can. Call it a mental health break, because it is.

I work on a 9-month contract, so summer employment is kind of optional. After the baptism of fire I’ve been through since October, it was a necessity. While at work, I’ve been marinating in an extensive menu of toxic experiences and had no idea of what I was getting myself into when I chose “solidarity” as my Happier Labor Day word of the year back in September. I hit the floor October 1st and my union contract expired at the end of that month. Negotiations were said to have been initiated in January of last year, though no progress had been made. My employer has violated that contract and hasn’t negotiated in good faith. I’ve been on strike 4 times in the 9 months I’ve been employed there. They have made their “last, best, and final offer,” and have moved to implementation, which honestly feels like employment date rape. So while executive and administrative staff are 50% better off since 2017 in terms of salary and compensation, frontline workers like me are at an 8% deficit over the same time period, both adjusted for inflation. While there is a general hiring freeze, there are plenty of exceptions for staff in the former categories, not so much for the latter, where staffing issues are just one of the things demoralizing the workforce. I’ll not go into detail on all the things that make the experience so traumatizing, just suffice it to say that in the limited hours I wasn’t at work, commuting to or from, or getting ready for or landing home from, I spent bed rotting as a form of physical, mental, and emotional recovery and engaged in personal life administration and adulting as little as possible.

So I said, “peace out” to a summer schedule and knew exactly what I wanted to do with my summer instead: get back to the land, spend as much time as I can in fresh air, sunshine, and growing myself as much as I grow seeds into plants. I reached out to my community at the Gill Tract Community Farm and told them I’d be back for the summer. They quickly recruited me to train as a Veteran Farm Educator, embracing me deeper into that magical community. I’m volunteering at a mighty little community garden around the corner from my home, and will be checking out other similar opportunities all summer. I’ve even developed the bandwidth to participate more in the amazing container garden my SO has started in our very limited outdoor space. I’ve also been accepted to the Master Gardener program through UC Extensions.

I’ve given myself the months of June and July to work as full time as I can at farming and gardening, giving me about a week on either end to follow my intuition and do as little or as much as I feel emerging, with full permission and forgiveness if it’s not much. I’m building a pretty regular schedule of farm and gardening time and admit to a bit more downtime than I intended, though it’s theraputic, so I’m not going to fight it. I need the play, the restoration, getting my face in nature, exploration, learning, growth, and the rest. All of it.

Solidarity has also meant not just standing with my AFSCME 3299 union in our ongoing struggle for fair treatment as workers, it has also meant standing alongside former colleagues in the blindness field who are seeking a fair contract for their newly formed union and showing up for demonstrations demanding transparency and accountability from executives at the same agency.

I’m also hitting a staggering milestone birthday this month that my GenX brain is having a hard time accepting: 50. I mean, as the sentiment often goes, I felt 30 when I was 15, and approaching 50, I still feel 30, even if my body doesn’t always. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up and I’m still not sure if I want to grow up. This milestone birthday was, in no small part, also why I chose to take the summer off. I decided to treat myself not just to a return to the magical city of New Orleans to finally get the visit I didn’t seem to get the first two times, but to extend my stay and really enjoy myself. I added a few extra days to my stay for the national convention of the National Federation of the Blind that allowed me to take in a walking ghost tour and some really nice jazz at Preservation Hall. I had time to take in the French Quarter, eat outside the hotel a lot and never more than once at the same place, and eventually did some recreational shopping, which is not something I typically indulge in.