It took long enough, but it finally hit 70 in Seattle. In the morning driving in how the mist clung to the trees, and it was Double Stamp Wednesday at the coffee shop, and when I left work about noon it was starting to burn off, and I opened the sun roof and turned up the music and wondered if I had time for a nap.

How the dog’s ears flap when she walks and trots, all about. Spring. The breeze tickling the undersides of the leaves, the slow rain of cherry blossoms in the grass gathering like snow. I had my last meeting and took off my shirt and went outside with the foldout chair in the driveway, a can of beer and the radio with the garage bay doors open. Charlotte dug for worms, got hot and discouraged. The dog and the cat panting too, bent over, compromised, pathetic: hunkering down in the shade of the Volvo. Ginger’s face wrinkled and panting like a Mongolian dog painting, 14th century.

And despite the sense the world is about to peak with this exuberance still there is a suffering. At work, a pending announcement of org changes everyone knows is coming, but they’re hardened by it, unfazed. I think about a full time job there now and I can imagine it, I get excited by the thought. I talked to my career coach and somehow made it more real just by talking about it. I don’t like to believe I need status, I really don’t, but there’s an element of feeling legitimate you don’t get contracting. You can have the flexibility to leave at noon and walk your dog on the first nice day of spring (it took until May 3 to exceed the 60s here) but I felt like I wanted more.

Loren is coming with his son Arthur this weekend but the weather will turn by then, and we’ll be back to damp shades of green, morning soccer games, the challenge for me to cook vegetarian and find beer worth drinking that doesn’t have hops, for Loren’s sensitive aspect. “Sours,” a concept I don’t quite get, don’t have to.

Walking Ginger earlier, thinking all this and half-there experiencing it, half-not, thinking about it. Fully present with the sun in the foldout chair drinking beer though, barefoot, ignorant to what comes next.

Categories: Memoir, musings

Tags: being present, humor, meaning of existence, pacific northwest, postaday, Seattle, William Pearse writer, work identity, work-life balance