Stunned, I smiled, accepted the card, and resolved to call him the next day during business hours. Later that week, I was making my first drive up to Thomasville. I cannot tell you the unquantifiable amount of good it does for a troubled soul to just drive up winding country roads alone for a while. The steady scenery of empty green land and old wooden farm signs with long precarious dirt paths up to some rickety and some pristine country mansions was mesmerizing. For once, I wasn’t thinking about being sick. I was leaving that behind me in Florida and looking forward to something entirely new. What was so magical about working across state lines, in a town touched so much more strongly by Southern culture and rural living, was that it always felt new to me and it always felt like a getaway, even though it was work. Everything was slower there. The speed limits, the flow of words exiting the mouths of the locals, the line at the gas station, the mere handful of traffic lights as they switched red to green. Everything moves and changes slower in Thomasville. That was just what I needed in this era of my life that was marked by nothing but unexpected and unwanted change.
For hundreds of shifts, I got to clear my head over forty minutes and thirty-three miles of winding country road. I got to enjoy the extended flourishing entrance to the small campus that was itself once a fine plantation. I grew accustomed to the leaves on the sides of the path leading from the soccer field to the Magnolia building, my building. A building I still have keys to years later because no one worries about things like that in Thomasville. I miss the fact that my first official university position was at a school of one thousand students, who roamed class to class in buildings that were actually the size of humble homes, arranged in a sort-of circle around some open green land in the middle of the old town. The intended and achieved feel was that of the old fashioned village. A circular sidewalk connected all these tiny buildings full of kind people just trying to do right by each other and make Thomasville, a town troubled by low education rates and a markedly high rate of poverty, a better place through education.
There weren’t departments, there were families. There weren’t teachers and advisors so much as there were friends, mentors, and allies. Everybody knew everybody and no one was above taking off their jacket for the sweat filled walk around that circular sidewalk to the cafeteria, where you could buy a grilled cheese from Ms. Linda for $1.50. “You want it on white or wheat, baby?”, she’d ask, though it always sounded to me like every word had an extra syllable or two thanks to her homey Southern drawl.
Sure, I may have spent most of my time running Xerox copies across that tiny campus in the killer Georgia heat, but I had a place to be, and people there to check up on me and that was all I had wanted since realizing I was sick. No one asked me why I was so thin or pale or why my freshly sewn together arm had me looking like a real-life Raggedy Anne doll and I always knew I had Bill to thank for that. He understood something about unwanted questions surrounding unplanned scars and in every other respect as well, he was a father figure from day one. Within a few months, I felt so comfortable with Bill that I could tell him, in no uncertain terms, that I needed to finish a day’s work from home due to menstrual cramps. Never before had I had a boss who would sigh and say to me in a way only a parent can, “Jessica, Jessica, Jessica....what am I going to do with you?”
There was something I’ll never fully be able to explain about what it’s like to work in an environment where everyone’s on a first name basis regardless of degree or title and where screen doors swing shut behind you when you leave someone’s office, much like they might have when you left your grandmother’s back porch as a kid. There is an instant sort of familiarity and coziness that you sink into when a community like that opens its arms to you. I may have just been a temp running copies across that small campus, but I never doubted for a second that I had a place to be and a reason to be there and that people needed me. I know I truly loved my time in Thomasville because while I spent my entire drives to work getting my mind off of Florida, I spent every drive back thinking about the day I was leaving behind, happy to have a surrogate state to spend my days in, free from the realities I’d collected back in the so-called state of sun and fun.