The cicadas are waking me up in the mornings these days. I've stopped making a full pot of coffee, because by the time I'm awake and downstairs to drink it, the temperature outside has already pounded the top of my mercury thermometer on the deck, and slurping down a furnace--even a caffeinated furnace--is too much for me to bear.
I'll have a cup or two at the office, or so I tell myself. Jan O'Brien, the lovely woman who works at the post office counter below my little workshop, always has the coffee ready when I come by. I will pick up lunch for Jan once or twice a month (which really only entails walking over to Mary's and bringing it back to her), and somehow, that's enough for her to call it even in terms of providing me with coffee every morning, rain or shine. (Or sleet or gloom of night.)
Except for July, that is. This single month of the year is Jan's vacation time, the four weeks where she allows herself time off to go and travel the world. Jan's sister covers for her. She doesn't make me coffee.
I've known Jan for a good while now, certainly long before I resurrected the Confluence Spectator and began renting the second floor office above her counter. As a fresh out of college boy who was living pretty far away from his parents, I'd send letters home. My parents never liked talking on the phone. Dad usually managed a few words before he passed the phone to Mom. "Here's your mother" became our version of goodbye.
And of course I wrote letters to other friends, too, friends from college, my old professors, and people I'd met when I did a backpacking trip through the Green Mountains. I would hand write the letters, fold them carefully, and carry them in the back pocket of my blue jeans to the post office.
"Hello, sweetheart!" Jan would say every time I walked in. She said this the first time I walked in, decades ago. She said it to me the same way last week.
She sits on a stool behind the counter, taking envelopes, selling stamps, and chatting with anyone who walks in. She is, silver hair, wire frame glasses, glass bead jewelry and all, the spitting image of an anachronism. This is how Jan O'Brien appeared to me when I first met her, and this is how she looks today. Hello sweetheart, and then it's headfirst into whatever happens to be going on. She is not a gossip, nor is she a tattle. She is simply interested and interesting.
Jan has been around the world more times than I will ever travel in my lifetime. From her own telling it, she sat behind the post office counter long enough, watching with interest as packages arrived from all over the world, each one bearing a stamp or a marking from far away continents, and eventually enough was enough. She began saving her money--and her vacation time--and then she shoved off.
First, it was Ireland, home for Jan's ancestors and home to many of her dreams. Then to Bolivia. Then a string of visits to Asia: Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China, and Korea. She has a fascinating story of crossing the DMZ and entering quite illegally into North Korea. Then hopscotching the Atlantic, back and forth, Chile and France, Venezuela and South Africa, Argentina and Israel.
The particular spring I began renting the office upstairs, Jan was preparing for a trip to Greece. Hello sweetheart, fine how are you, and then began a lovely back and forth of what she was learning from the guidebooks she'd purchased. Over coffee, she would tell me of the things she would like to see. A few weeks later, we began a primer on speaking Greek. She wanted the full immersion experience, and that meant speaking--even primitively--the language.
It was quite the vicarious experience, I'd say, hearing Jan's voice grow eager as each month passed, hearing her gain command of the new words she'd learned, seeing the small ways she prepared herself.
And then, July 1st, she was gone. Always July 1. There is something startling and yet utterly familiar about it. Every year I'll walk into the post office and feel a pit of fear jolt my stomach when I do not hear "Hello, sweetheart!" ring out. I try to hide my disappointment at her sister's perfectly polite "good morning."
This year Jan is off to Sweden. I asked her to bring me back collapsible furniture or meatballs--which ever is easier. The language lessons were quite funny after I showed her a video of the Swedish chef from the Muppet Show.
Even as I write this now from my second floor office and its view of Main Street, the children running with push-up ice cream pops, their mothers strolling slowly behind, it still feels too quiet, too different for my comfort. I am jealous of Jan, I envy her as she boards her trans-Atlantic flight, and yet I cannot help but wonder if this is the same feeling she gets every time I don't show up for work, off on my own trips to visit family or friends in far away towns.
Probably not. But this is how life is, how work and offices make for strange neighbors. How, come July, I have to make my own coffee and suffer three weeks of "good mornings." This is how one knows it's July. And how easy it is to feel excited for August.
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