Cider Sips

Life back on the east coast has fallen back into its rhythms, as we say.  The weather has cooled, the leaves are changing, I have my annual end of September cold.  Predictability and rhythms are important sometimes.  Right, now as a I sit here amid long essays I'm filing and composing predictability seems to resonate like a founders ale at a locale beer show.  Dark, deep tones of amber, smooth edges of nutmeg and cinnamon making that ale a pumpkin seasonal spout.  

Of course, pumpkin anything--in the changing, colorful days of fall--has been a pop culture affection/affection/addition of basic white people.  Even as I sit here now, with a regional pumpkin cider (Harpoon, to be exact) in a flannel left over from last year's make, I feel a mix of melancholy and romance with the changing seasonal tides. For as much as I love fall, it's colors, and its crisp air it also singles the end of the summer, long days, and sun kissed skin.  Though, this year . . . I find myself fighting to hang onto memories of happier days, peaceful days, and days idlly ticked away with moments of assurance, peace, and happiness.  

The east coast, by and large, has long left me feeling awash, alone, and remiss.  Things I've already long talked about, and new things . . . particularly events of recent and late August reminding me assaulting me into reality that my time is up and I have to move on.  Metaphorically and literally. 

It's no secrete that out left this past summer I pondered where I want to go next, and I've made no secret that I'm moving careers.  I've long loved teaching and writing, but the framework of higher education is making my basic life--more basic than that of pumpkin spice even--unsustainable.  Of course, I started out tinkering with public policy and I've always said I wanted to take that route . . . see if I could be part of the impact, the dialogue, the sweet and subtle undertones like summer peach ciders out on my beloved left coast left lacing sensations of sun's rays and warmth on my tongue.  Though, even more hearty like the fruit and nut salad backed by a light toned beer, a saison to be exact.  

Tonight, as I tinker away between metaphorical raindrops and tangible applications filling my browser tabs and preparing mental notes for Friday's interview for a part-time position, the blinks of my eye take me back to those summer nights and afternoons and mornings.  Spiced Chai yogurt, local coffee, and twice a week having the budget afford me a beer and a happy hour "snack" (i.e. meal) fueled isolated and charmed filled days.  These days for every moment of splendor the bottom falls out again, more profusely and far less poetically than my old novel heroine of Anne Shirely could have dreamed.  

Last summer my greatest heartbreak was waiting for Limey to be repaired after miles of me, hills too steep for either of us to fathom, and roads the seemed to stretch for endless miles.  I never did remember to use my ride mapping app from beginning to end.  

Perhaps that is for the better, as then I can project Anne's idealistic charm and conjecture that those roads were hundreds of miles of sun kissed flowers and ciders too delicious to immortalize in words.

Instead pictorial markers of my laptop, me, and ciders paint the landscape of memory.  The black-cherry cider still haunts my dreams and the blackberry is not far behind.  I bought a mason jar, or two, of that to chuck home from McMenamins a few nights.  After all, on the writer's, and perpetually underemployed, budget an eight dollar dinner, and an eight dollar jar to bring home, could stretch a tightly crafted budget to that at week's end the sandwiches had been made and eaten and the last seasonal cherry was consumed as Limey and I head out on the next adventure, usually also coinciding with a visit to the market to pic up edible provisions.  

At one point I worried everyone knew the laptop girl with a cider love, who nursed no more than two for a few hours . . . so I toted my tablet to read some literature and make mental notes on a project's progress.  The budget prevented me from consuming more, self respect another, and the one night I had three I had to walk Limey home.  My cider tonight is 4.8 percent alcohol.  Those, in the summer's rays, ranged from 8 to 11.  Two pints of fruity bliss made Limey a moderately safe ride.  More than that and gravity threatened to take action. 

In the end, life remained very good.  

These days the sunsets fade, and the chill starts to settle in, the leaves are turning . . . the articles I write are waiting in ques, waiting in my mind to be written, and always waiting for review.  The radio silence, which I've always found rude, echoes into the night as deadlines pass and you send that piece off somewhere else . . . always wondering if you really are that decent of a writer.  Maybe this isn't your calling either as the lines of the digital page grow but the affirmation--in forms of capitalistic payments--are far and few between.  Now matter how resistant you are, you have to wonder.  

Career halts, failures, and assaults haunt emotional memory no different than terse words between lovers and friends tip that scales of harmony.  Bitter remarks, retreats in corners, questions of where anyone stands lay flat on the page.  The damage to my soul is deep, it is dark, and it is raw and seeping.  Fresh salt added firey flames recently.  Yet, just as lovers rest and wait out the tides of a fight, a misunderstanding, and pain of crosswords (near always in the cover of night), there is little to do but press on and figure out where is the next right.  Unlike the ability of lovers to mend, and overcome, the reality of life teaches us (perhaps alarmingly and harshly) that not all professional paths can be undone, redone, or made whole.  In the end, that is the difference with the reality of lovers, my long loved Anne Shirley, and life itself.  Having love, power, passion, and talent can't always take you very far.  It takes the community to embrace you, and when they shun you . . . you have to find the mellow finish on your cider to rest your weary senses and bring them back to an un-assaulted state of sensibility and taste.  

Afterall, I do live in a world with Octobers.  Maybe this time job offers won't fade, funding won't be lost, I'll get that interview I want so badly and that I've worked so hard for, and I will make the long awaited move.  Maybe the public diplomacy position I've always thought I would be great at will open up in Brussels, or Geneva, or maybe the ones here.  Maybe.  In the end, while life often does not have the refining glue like two hearts lost and alone it sometimes functions in the same way.  It still looks for the mate. The soul.  The sweet, mellow, smooth finish just under the foamy surface comforting the holder until the last sip.