A Dream for All Seasons
Transition.
It’s a very antiseptic word for times in one’s life so prone to being messy, like getting divorced, downsizing out of a job, or shutting down during a pandemic.
My season of transition began before I realized it. By the time I was aware, winter’s interlude of dormancy and reflection had nearly passed. Spring was about to be reborn when I discovered that my career of over three and a half decades was coming to a close earlier than I had expected. Is it perhaps a little foolish to think we can plan for all endings? Or anticipate all beginnings for that matter?
So there I was, a season late and at least a dollar short, trying to understand where the tide of events from the deeply personal to the collectively global had left me along this stretch of sand that was the rest of my life. The business of wrapping up a practice devoted to advocacy for children left me inevitable moments of introspection. My own children were long since grown, off in the wide world discovering their own destinies. I wondered if it was simply time for younger professionals to step into my old shoes. Yet the truth is they didn’t need them; they had their own. So, I tossed mine on top of what was left in forlorn banker boxes that held so little to show for all that time and work. I had gone from feeling needed, in demand even, to being, well, not even there. Closing up the last of my cases had left me a bit like a ghost in some Victorian novel: Wandering, waiting, seldom heard and barely seen, striving to finish the unfinished so that I might pass over.
Then the rain came. Days of it, until I found myself wondering if the dreams I had of becoming a writer were merely optical tricks of drenched land and weeping sky. My reasoning brain offered lists of goals achieved in the pursuit of it, but those were washed away by flash floods of self-doubt, cold and gray. My internal visibility was so poor I could not see a trace of my desired horizon.
Thinking a change of pace and place would refresh my perspective I went window shopping with my husband in nearby Port Washington, perched proudly above the shore of Lake Michigan. On the way there I silently watched the rain, streaming down the windshield, defying the wipers in a constant onslaught. Tears threatened to follow suit as I struggled to ignore my uncertainty and doubt, as relentless as the rain.
Trying to focus on anything but what I was feeling, I watched a van pass us. Hand-painted in the left-rear window was the succinct assertion, “God Loves You.” In anticipation of those contesting the veracity of that statement, the right-rear window insisted, “It’s True.”
In spite of my mood I laughed out loud, the serendipitous having always appealed to me. The gesture was not subtle but it was effective. Though my prospect began lifting, the rain came down even harder as we parked along the awakening main thoroughfare, dotted with small businesses, some open and coping with the present realities, others closed permanently, casualties of the pandemic.
We meandered from shop to shop, taking in the restored, the repurposed, and reimagined. Ideas began to flow through my brain as I observed not just items but people. I grabbed inspiration with both fists, stuffing it into cubby holes in my head because I had forgotten a notebook. With each encounter my faith in my dream of being a writer stirred.
Serendipity had still more in store, though.
Intrigued by a sodden but still readable sandwich board on the main drag, we decided to find the Guenther House Collective-Vintage and New Shop, at 300 Pier Street, which promised treasures worth exploring. Heading east toward the lake, we passed waning summer, still dressed in her finery but caught without an umbrella in the drenching prelude to fall. Joe gallantly took my hand, helped me pass road construction blocking the sidewalk, and then pointed ahead. The turn-of-the-century Cream City brick structure we sought rose before us. I stood for a moment, taking in its gentle face.
Amidst the palpably welcoming ambiance was the warm harbor I’d needed that day. I wandered among the clever arrangements marrying the antique and the novel, the profound and the playful. Around a corner a small alcove held what I was meant to find there, if you believe that sort of thing. An old chest of drawers displaying a collection of vintage items held a weathered, exquisitely tooled, leather journal cover. In the very center on the front were initials consistent with my new pen name, and the name I share with my Joe.
My heart knew for certain then as I caressed that simple, old thing that my dream is real because it is mine and real to me. And that is, in fact, enough. No earthly endorsement is necessary. It is said there is a season for everything, a time for every purpose under heaven. Whether my skies are graced with rainfall or sunshine, writing in and of itself is enough for my season of transition.
The rain eventually passed, followed by shining days of early autumn. The chilly nights have meant Wisconsin is packing away her summer things, pulling out her sweaters of russet and sienna, and of course, green and gold. I must haunt my old life from time to time but that grows less and less. When I must go there I try to be a good ghost, leaving each one I visit with a kind thought rather than a bitter fright. Always now there is the glittering prospect of my new life, and I know for certain that it is not a mirage.
“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.”
