Damp Earth Humid Heat
July 28 — August 1, Amherst, MA USA
Seasonal Memoir Entry #17
I leave for Switzerland on Sunday evening for a long-anticipated one-year leadership position at the International School of Zug and Luzern. While Tina and I put tremendous thought into the prospect of me spending my “gap year” as Interim HS Principal, we both underestimated the separation anxiety and dread this move would cause. What has made these feelings more pronounced, perhaps, is that this year away is not driven by financial needs (though the income will certainly help), but rather the belief that I should stay engaged in my chosen profession, and that after a challenging professional experience in Dubai, getting back into a high school will provide the professional catharsis to arrive in India in 2022 in good stead. And to do this in Switzerland… well, there are worse places to live!
There are three reasons Zach and Tina are not joining me (though I will return to the U.S. a few times for prolonged visits, while leading “remotely”): 1. we want Zach to repatriate home for his final year of HS, considering he’ll go to university in the U.S. (likely a New England liberal arts college); 2. Tina deserves the opportunity to reboot her nursing career, after giving it up to trail my career overseas; and 3. when you live and work overseas, a year home with extended family is priceless, if you have the luxury of such an opportunity.
Nevertheless, it aches. So, alas, here we go.
Switching gears, we had some drama with a baby raccoon, which I noticed stumbling (that is the right verb) down out of the woods so it could crawl under our porch. The animal was clearly struggling, falling over several times. After about an hour, the raccoon came out from under the porch and stuck close to the house. Tina had called animal control and a salty officer (78 years young!) came to the house and assessed the raccoon. She suspected the animal was separated from his mother (likely dead), and because he was only a month or so old, the prospects were not good. We were given the option of calling the police (to put him down, gulp), or we could move it out to the neighbouring corn field and hope that the mother would come back. After some hemming and hawing, we chose the latter option, and the animal control officer netted the raccoon (who protested vigorously), and she and Tina walked to the back field to release the animal. About an hour later, Tina was wracked with guilt about leaving the raccoon out there in the field (especially since I had seen a bobcat a few days prior), and after some discussion on the merits of trying to rescue the animal, we (she) decided to go out there to find the raccoon (we had heard about a raccoon rescue farm from the animal control officer).
It didn’t take long to find him in the cornfield, sitting there looking pathetic. We returned to the house and got a recycling bin, some cardboard, and a broom (ostensibly to trap the animal). When we returned, he was nowhere to be found. We looked everywhere, searching in every direction, and far farther than the sick animal could ever have moved. It was confounding, as there was not even a trace of movement. The only conclusion we were left to draw was that the raccoon met a swift end at the claws of a bobcat, or some other predator. This was unsettling, to say the least. It happened so quickly. Such are the laws of nature. Unrelenting and without compassion.
As a non sequitur, I’ll offer a little self-pity to end this post. My tennis game is a disaster, as I’m suffering from a version of the twisties (thank you, Simone Biles, for articulating the term), where my brain is saying one thing, but my body is doing another. It’s simply a matter of age, but it’s nevertheless unsettling. I can’t execute the shots that I could do as muscle memory back in my prime. It’s now mind under matter. Oh well, these are “first world problems”. Time to adjust my expectations!
