Three Days – A Look Back Part II

TWENTY TWO: I celebrated my 22^nd birthday on the continent of Australia.  I cannot remember a THING about it, but I know we were in the Sydney area.  We must have gone out somewhere.  I’m sure it was fun.

I celebrated Christmas of this year on the continent of Europe – in England, specifically, with my boyfriend and his family.  Although he was not a good guy, as has been discussed at length, he showed me a really wonderful English Christmas.  He lived (and presumably still lives) in a little village in the south of England, famous for nothing much.  You won’t have heard of it.  We had a fancy dinner on Christmas Eve in the local hotel, which was over 300 years old.  His Great Gran was there, and she pulled the Christmas Crackers and wore the funny hats just like everyone else, and we ate roasted parsnips and sticky toffee pudding and drank wine together.  It was a wonderful evening.  On Christmas day we went down to the local pub, which is what everyone does, from kids ordering hot chocolates to the men and their beers, the women and their wine, and the grannies with their half pints of shandy (half beer, half Sprite.)  I drank a shandy myself, and met tons of people who had grown up with Ben, and thought to myself “what a wonderful tradition this is!”  Sometime during our 2 weeks there, we saw Stonehenge, spent a couple of days in London, went out to his local pub and got sloshed and then bought a donner kebab from a dodgy all night greasy spoon, we bought a pizza and watched it in front of a soccer game, and did all manner of traditional English stuff.  It was a wonderful Christmas.

I spent the latter part of my 22^nd year back on my own continent, at home in America, and lived with my parents for a month or so before beginning my naturalist job in Ohio.  I worked as a tutor and substitute teacher – I stayed with friends in Indiana and helped them out with their newborn son (who is now, obviously, EIGHT) – and then I packed up a few boxes and my 1992 Toyota truck and moved to Ohio.

TWENTY THREE: I was a naturalist at an outdoor center in Ohio during this whole year of my life.  This was the year that I had the job I loved, more than any job I’ve had before or since.  During the school year I would dress up as a pioneer and teach small children about making candles, fetching water, building log cabins, gathering herbs.  I also taught classes in geology, composting, botany, and American history.  During the summer I took passels of rowdy children white water rafting, kayaking, canoeing, camping.

In July of this year my boyfriend, whose behavior had gotten steadily worse over the months we spent together in Ohio, went home to England.  I called him there and ended our relationship over the phone, which may sound cowardly but it was the only safe way I could do it.  The only way I could be sure it would stick.  I entered my twenty-fourth year as a freed woman, and everything was different from them on.  I learned a lot through that experience.  Although I loved my job and my friends, twenty three was probably my most tortured and unhappy year of my twenties, and escaping the relationship that made me feel so bad meant that twenty four was guaranteed to be much, much, much better.