Life Contest
If those mystics are right, and you choose your own obstacles through many lifetimes, I picked my road this time around to be hidden and lumpy and snaking through dark sticky brambles. My Avon is like my dead marriage is like my patchwork careers is like my general unknowing, all going somewhere, who knows where, all vapor and dream specked with loud scary noises.
I left my brochures in doctor's waiting rooms and stacked in a neat pile next to DEET-enhanced bug spray at the campground store, now mercifully free of rabid racoons. I asked the Franciscan priest at the Catholic Church if I could leave a brochure in the baby crying room. I danced around town with two boys on an invisible leash. And all the while my heart sang songs about the way I was, the way I am, the way I might someday be, maybe a rich Avon Lady touring Thailand, or a broke Avon Lady eating peanut butter, maybe somebody between, maybe someone quite different.
I thought about my old life, the times I wanted to quit and run. I remembered my married life in the middle of the country, the winter the ground froze solid, insulating the earth from everything on the surface. Covered in long cotton underwear, multiple sweaters, hats, gloves, scarves tied around our faces, we were insulated from each other, relying on words to get our emotions across. The winter broke me, too cold to work, too cold to think, my dreams frozen, becoming icicles, eventually breaking free and shattering on the ground. My husband suggested a move to a warmer climate, someplace where work was plentiful and living was cheap, someplace where we could awaken our dreams with the heat of the sun and the healing power of gentle rains.
We pulled up our roots and transplanted in a southern city. I didn't know why we chose this city, I never lived in a city before, with its constant car noise and exhaust fumes. We added another boy to our brood, and were expecting another. I spent my days changing diapers and studying computer code in an urban apartment. I imagined a career in technology, tried to touch and taste it. We lived on the top level of a five-floor building, and mixed in with the angles and concrete and asphalt outside were sky-high magnolia trees and a shiny green creeping veneer of kudzu.
The apartments were once luxury accomodations, open and spacious, with an inground pool and exercise room, built in a garden setting close to the river. Now, thirty years later, the road slithered around more aging strip malls, car washes, mattress stores, and auto dealerships than the eye could see, a veritable tacky temple to capitalism. The apartments were home to lower middle class African American families and illegal aliens from Latin America. We were one of only two caucasion tentants, and they stuck us in adjacent apartments in the back of the compound. The pool sat perpetually closed from repairs, the exercise room, graffiti initials sprayed on the door, stayed locked for fear of gang activity. Some families crammed up to twenty people in a one bedroom unit, so poor that they kept the windows open instead of running the air conditioner, and tomatillos, onion and corn cooking smells and Tejano music invaded my senses, making it hard for me to sleep at night.
My life seems so removed from that apartment, those days, yet it seems the same, full of unknowing and mystery and making ends meet, like it's the same lesson, different teacher, and I wonder, think, grasp, try to figure out what in the world I am learning through Avon. I can't find it yet.
7:28:17 AM 
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