There is nothing easier than waking up early the day after the last day of school.
This year, May 23rd is the day after the last day of school. And, just like every year in my teaching career so far, I wake up way before my alarm that morning, the exhaustion that comes from Teaching Freshmen Boys in May suddenly nowhere to be found in my bones.
On every other morning of the school year, the 5:30am to 6:30am hour blinks by in an instant: I jolt awake, rush to get dressed, grab the yogurt, granola, and lunch I’ve prepared the night before, fill Katembe’s water bowl, brush my teeth, and hop on my bike, my eyes only fully opening once the burst of cool morning air hits my face as I’m pedaling down Snyder Boulevard, racing to beat the cars crawling at 15mph as they drive through the school zone near Pueblo Del Sol Elementary. I only ride for 12 minutes but somehow arrive at Buena seconds before 7am, speed-walk to drop my lunch in the English teacher’s lounge, and make a beeline to my classroom, immediately entering professional mode, answering questions of my early students who are already standing outside my door when I arrive.
But on the day after the last day of school, time slows to an almost unbelievable pace: I stretch in bed until my body is ready to walk down the hallway, I sit with Katembe on the couch for a bit, then return to my room and slowly get dressed. I check my watch—still only 5:45? I make scrambled eggs and eat them over rice. Just barely 6:00? I poke around my closet until I find the perfect sized tote bags to hold the remains of my classroom. Not even 6:30? I make myself some tea and pour it over ice in a mason jar, then spend some time outside with Katembe, tossing his toy with him in the cool desert morning air. STILL not 6:30? Doesn’t hurt to be early on my last contracted day.
On the day after the last day of school, I drive my car instead of riding my bike. As I pull away from my house, the song “How Lucky” by John Prine and Kurt Vile comes through my speakers, and the opening verse, “Today, I walked down the street I used to wander / Yeah, shook my head and made myself a bet / There was all these things that I don't think I remember / Hey, how lucky can one man get?” hits my ears in a particularly poignant way. I become keenly aware of everything around me as I make my last commute: I notice tiny blooms on the prickly pears along the sidewalk, I notice the curves of the tall cypress trees, permanently bent by the relentless wind, and I notice cars driving in the opposite direction of me. I find this quite curious. Usually, it feels like everyone in town is moving towards Buena High School in the morning, with three key exceptions: the elementary school teacher who walks to work with her matching tote bag and water bottle, the older couple with the golden retriever who hold hands and slowly head towards the church at the end of my street, and on Thursdays only, my pickleball friend Nick, who is on the final stretch of his weekly 10-mile run. Today, though, people move in all directions, and even though there are no flashing lights for the school zone by Pueblo Del Sol, everyone still drives slowly, because, after all, this is the day after the last day of school: who is in a rush?
I park and walk towards the back entrance to Buena, where I find Scott and Sheri cleaning up the last of Project Graduation. Sheri says that she’s heard a rumor about me moving to Ecuador, and I confirm it, and she asks the pressing question most of my retired friends have: “Is there pickleball down there?” Scott nods to my mason-jar-tea-situation and says that he respects me for bringing my own bourbon on the last day. Sheri rolls her eyes, Scott winks and says hasta luego, and I keep moving.
The “hasta luego” briefly reminds me that I need to practice more Spanish, but before I can start worrying about my Duolingo score, I run into Manny, Noah’s old partner teacher, who is arranging some of his famous jade plants in the planters near the ramp. We chat for a few minutes, and then I am off to my classroom for a scatterbrained morning. I pack, I toss, and I search for the addresses of lost students so I can mail them the letters they wrote themselves at the beginning of the year. Vinnie stops by and gives me advice about SIM cards and doing two-factor authentication when I move abroad. I find one last thank you card at the bottom of my desk and write out a note to my principal. I choose a tasteful amount of books and papers and office supplies to leave for the next teacher who takes my room. I securely tape down a singular notecard inside my top desk drawer that reads, “The student is not giving you a hard time. The student is having a hard time.” I put my plants in a box, fill my tote bags with the last few trinkets from my desk, turn in my keys and ID, and I make my rounds up and down the English and Social Studies halls, bidding my closest colleagues farewell.
I leave feeling settled, complete, and accomplished. The day after the last day of school slips into a joyful Friday evening.
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| Just before my last trip out of the building. |
*
It is three weeks later, and I cannot feel more distant from the calm bliss that was the day after the last day of school. I am laying on my couch, and I smell sage, and I feel dried tears on my chin, and I hear bells. Clementine is at my house, and she is the one ringing the bells. School ended, Noah and Marley came to visit, we hiked Ramsey Peak, they prepared for the sale of the house, I visited Cat in Flagstaff, I got a tattoo, I returned home, I looked ahead at my last summer in Sierra Vista, and I panicked. I knew I would feel sad about leaving Arizona once summer arrived, but, frustratingly, I was unable to feel sad: I only felt panic. I struggled to eat, I struggled to sleep, and when I did sleep, I woke up the next morning to find my heart still racing from the night before. I went to Bisbee to see Catie, I had an emergency EMDR session with my therapist, I called Emily back home, and still, the panic attacks and catch in my chest would not dissipate.
So I am on the couch and Clementine is here and she has resorted to the bells.
She assures me that this is grief, and that the only way through is to sit with the chaos of my feelings and do the inner work my body and spirit are requesting. I tell her that I desperately want to feel sad, feel angry, feel afraid—I want to feel anything but panic. She smudges the house and smudges Katembe just in case. I tell her I am afraid that my tattoo is cursed, because all I have done is look at it with disdain since I got it. She places her hand on my ankle and traces the mountains, noting how thin and intentional each line is. She says it holds strong energy, but certainly not cursed energy. We talk about how hot it is outside—the heat of desert summer has reached its peak, but there is still no rain to bring any relief. I just need the rain, I say, and she agrees.
A few minutes later, we pull cards from five different oracle decks. The last one we pull is called “Repetition,” and Clementine flips through the guidebook to read the description. The last piece of it reads:
In the heavens, in the earth, in societies, in relationship, in behaviours...repeating occurrences are everywhere. There are places where hot dry months roll into a build-up that breaks into the monsoon season on a repeating cycle of dry, heat and flood. The monsoons will come again, bringing rain for crops, but maybe also upheaval and disease. For the peoples who live in monsoon climates, this is the way life is. For an outsider, the cycle might seem extreme, but the residents are accustomed to the heat, the humidity and the wet. The relative ease, comfort and stability of more moderate weather cycles may be unknown or unfathomable to them. Cycles exist in our lives in so many ways. Once we fall into their circling reliability, it can be hard to imagine life any other way. (1)
We sit in silence for a few moments to take it in. The rain...she says, and I nod.
*
It is the week after Noah’s wedding, and I am standing in Miller Canyon during a thunderstorm. To be clear: I have not felt any rain, but the thunder has been rolling constantly for about 40 minutes. The creek is dry where we are standing, but I know there will be a little pool for Katembe to dip his paws in once we get closer to the bottom. Miller is part of the Huachuca Mountains, the very mountains that are now tattooed around my left ankle forever. “Huachuca” roughly means “place of thunder,” and I’ve heard this over the years, but I’ve never quite understood its meaning until today (2). Every time there is a new clap of thunder, I notice myself turning to try to see where it comes from. This is silly for two reasons: First, thunder is not visible. Even if there is lightning striking above, the trees are too thick for me to see it. Second, the thunder is bouncing off all sides of the mountains as I stand in the canyon, so as soon as I look to one direction, the sound rolls behind me, and then to the right, and then the left. I cannot pinpoint one origin. Maybe, there is no origin.
This is similar to the monsoons themselves: they are finally here, and they are changing the landscape in subtle ways each day, but it is impossible to pin down individual transformations as they happen. There is more grass here, the trail is a bit more dug out there, the rocks in the creek are darker shades of brown and gray. The change is all around.
Katembe walks ahead and I follow, my face suddenly wet, from the gentle drizzle or my welcome sadness, I do not know. I realize in this moment why the monsoons and their subtle but torrential change are resonating with me so much this summer. This is what my five years in Arizona have been: change all around, subtle but torrential, and impossible to pinpoint one thing about me that is different, because everything about me is different. And, therefore, it is impossible to pinpoint one feeling that encapsulates leaving this place, because it is all a storm, and it is all change.
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| Katembe did eventually find his favorite pool of water as little drops fell from the sky. |
*
It is a hot afternoon in mid-July, and I walk across the dining room to fill Katembe’s water bowl, and it takes my breath away. I have just walked across the center of my dining room for the first time in five years because the dining room table is gone.
The constant panic from the start of summer has finally subsided, and now I get hit with sudden gasps of intense sadness, like this moment with the table. Mere moments ago, I was fine, but now my body feels dizzy and I need to sit down. I breathe in and out, trying to slow my heart rate, trying to lean into the sadness and dodge the panic. Clementine says these moments are indications that my spiritual awareness is becoming more refined, and that I am learning to tune into different energies around me, whether I like it or not.
I walk back over to the empty space where the table used to be. The energy—that is, the remnants of joyful and sorrowful and banal memories that hang in that space—the energy is thick there. I pace in the little four-foot radius, trudging through thousands of moments of my life. The table was one of the first pieces of furniture Noah and I bought for the house five summers earlier: it was a good height, a good size, and had a beautiful mosaic pattern that made us feel sophisticated. It “really tied the room together,” as they say.
That table was where I ate so many bad beans, back in my phase where I couldn’t figure out how to make beans like I did in Mozambique. Relatedly, it is where Noah politely said, “I think we’re getting there,” after each bowl of bad beans.
The table was at the exact height of Katembe’s nose, and it was the site of his Famous Lasagna Theft the weekend our neighbor Hector died.
It was the perfect size for four people to have dinner, and when we first bought it, the idea of making two whole friends seemed ambitious. But after only a few months, the table managed to fit Harvey and Claire and Steph the first time we had friends over our house, when Noah’s college friend Sam was visiting and didn’t realize he had initiated our first ever dinner party. Then a few months later, it fit a slew of homemade pizzas the day we had Joshua and Hermione and Steph and Ibrahim over to celebrate the last weekend before school started back up.
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| Pizzas, July 2021. |
It was also where Noah and I were sitting one January evening after dinner a few years later, discussing our complex individual plans for the next few weekends, when I said to him, “I think we’re going to start doing a lot of growing in different directions,” and we sat in silence for a minute, and then an hour later, when he was ready, he said, “I think I feel sad about us growing in different directions,” and then we cried for a long time, granting ourselves and each other the permission to start that growth.
That table was where I sat with Steph and Alex after Alex and I came back from our first road trip together to Colorado and Utah, when Steph made us pancakes and eagerly asked to see every single photo we’d taken and lay out every single rock we’d brought home with us.
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| Breakfast, July 2023. |
It’s where I admitted, through tears, that I felt kind of upset when Claire got pregnant, because I was going to miss riding bikes with her. It’s where Noah told me that he thought that feeling was probably normal, and that I should talk to her about it. It’s where we had dinner and played Junkart with Claire and Harvey and their baby five days before they moved to Idaho last spring.
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| Junkart night, May 2024. |
Katembe is now laying down on the cool tile where the table used to be. I know if I stay here much longer, the memories will keep flooding and I will get exhausted. Also, the table is not yet gone; it is merely in the garage. But the yard sale is in two days. And I know what’s coming.
*
It is almost the end of July, and I am picking my mom up from the airport, and I am starting to feel a little numb, because I know there are so few checkpoints left in this summer.
*
It is a few days later, and a Carvana truck is pulling away with my car, and I stand in the almost-empty garage with Wesley and my mom, and I say, “I can’t believe they really just took my car,” and we laugh, and we go back to putting everything that’s left in boxes.
*
It is the next day, and Alex and I are at Miller Canyon for the last time, and we decide to ride our bikes to the top only using one gear like we did the day I asked him out, which feels like many lifetimes ago. Full circle, he says.
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| I am pointing to the single gear we used. I was very proud of this, both times we did it. |
*
It is my last night in Arizona, and the house is almost empty, and it is very late, and Steph is leaving, and I am saying goodbye to Steph, and my brain cannot comprehend that I will not see Steph in the morning, or after work on Monday, or at the courts on Wednesday night, and she is pulling away in her Jeep, and I am shattered.
*
It is my last morning in Arizona, and Alex and I are standing where the table used to be, and Katembe is wearing a lei we found in an old pile of Noah’s stuff, and the song “I Went To The Store One Day” comes on my speaker, and neither of us have ever heard the song, but we instinctively know it’s about us, and I look at the long, empty room, and I gasp, and I say, “My house!” and Alex reaches out to me, and I fall into his arms, and we gently rock back and forth, and I say, “I felt so safe here. I felt so loved here,” and he knows, and I know, and the song ends, and we walk hand in hand around the empty house, and he squeezes my hand as I cry, and we make our way outside, and I pull down the broken garage door that we never fixed, and I put Katembe and his lei in the truck, and I drive off.
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| July 27, 2025. |
*
*
*
It is the second day of pre-service at my new school in Quito. I am riding the bus to school, and we are on the last street before the turn towards campus, and it is bumpy. I realize I have been staring at one particular mountain peak for a few minutes, dozing in and out of awareness. Suddenly, my mind springs awake, and I think, What mountain is that? And I realize I have no idea. And I don’t feel overwhelmed, and instead, unimaginably, I feel glad.
Sources:
1. Toni Carmine Salerno & Leela J. Willams, Sacred Earth Oracle, Llewellyn Publications, May 2018.
2. “Fort Huachuca History, 1877 to 1945,” Southwest Association of Buffalo Soldiers, n.d.: https://swabuffalosoldiers.org/history/fort-huachuca-history-1877-to-1945/
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