Fireflies and Faith
Leaving Death in the Dust
PREVIOUS- Leaving Death in the Dust- Introduction
“A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” ― Chief Crowfoot
On an early July evening in 2014, shortly after our hasty move to Tennessee, I sat outside waiting for the fireflies to light up the night as it began falling and thought about my first time seeing one. It had only taken us three days to move what we could cram into the back of the largest U-Haul truck they made, 1609 miles to Pop and Grama K’s house in southwest Tennessee, but I felt as if I had been drug across the bumpy midwestern prairie in a Mormon handcart over six months’ time. My bones felt weary, my heart felt achy, and the text messages from our friends who were wanting moving updates had started to slow down to a trickle. This was not something we had spent a great deal of time planning up until it happened. We had considered it several times over our married years, but the timing of it just wasn’t right until it was. I think we were both tired of feeling as if we were running in hamster wheel circles and needed to step off. I was frustrated with the school system, the predominant religious system, the population growth, what was influencing my boys, and uncertainties about my vocational future. Todd’s brother had started a job at Virginia Tech in 2013 that he got because of a friend, also named Todd, a.k.a. Boss Todd, who they had built custom homes with, in Utah, up until things went south economically in 2007-2008. After that, Boss Todd went back to working in higher education and ended up moving to work at Virginia Tech. Oddly enough, Todd’s brother’s job at Virginia Tech was similar to the job Todd had using his carpentry skills at The University of Utah. It was Todd’s brother’s move to Virginia that started our moving ball rolling and for a while we were torn between moving to Virginia and Todd pursing another job at Virginia Tech or moving closer to his parents’ home in Adamsville, Tennessee. Todd also applied for a job in Nashville and Knoxville, but when the doors for those three options all seemed to be supernaturally closed, we knew we were headed for Adamsville which was confirmed by Todd’s strange dreamlike vision of the Adamsville Presbyterian church he grew up in. The dream came to him one day as he was commuting home from work on the Frontrunner train while we were trying to decide exactly where we were going. It was one of those kinds of experiences that seemed directional. Todd had been talking about moving to Washington state in 2013, but I wasn’t thrilled about going somewhere where we knew no one. By January of 2014, I was beginning to feel the urge from deep down inside myself that it was time for us to move as well. Todd’s grandmother had passed away in November of 2010. We attended her funeral, the peaceful easy southern feeling that I often got when we visited his family, was still fresh in my mind, and I felt as if the south was drawing me in. We put our home up for sale in March of 2014 and signed it over to its new owners a few days before my birthday in June of that same year.
The image of our rented and most likely overpacked U-Haul swaying with the gait of an elephant was burned in my brain. I could still clearly see Todd driving it over the edge of the concrete at the end of our former driveway which couldn’t have been more than a couple of inches higher than the asphalt street in what would now be our former cul-de-sac. I held my breath as I sat in the driver’s seat of what we now refer to as “Ole Blue,” because she’s been rode hard and put up wet. Blue is the 2000 Chevy truck we purchased a couple of months before our move to use as a work truck for the small home repair and remodeling business we planned on starting when we got to Tennessee. Blue has served our business purposes well over this past decade of hard labor. Todd had one job lined up for a family friend once we were in Tennessee, beyond that, we figured his skills would be able to keep us fed, but the uncertainty of it all lurked in the back of my mind. As for me, I had quit my job doing drug testing at a pain clinic in Ogden and waved goodby to any previous sense of work-related security I had ever had along with any sense of where I would be going with the rest of my life. I was still bringing in some pocket change working as an online adjunct instructor in the Medical Laboratory Sciences dept. at Weber State University, but I knew this move would dash any notions I may have had about being initially recruited in regard to an associate immunohematology professor position right out of my head, and I was ok with that. 2008 had changed many things, including any chances I may have previously had at moving into teaching my specialty in a higher education setting, and deep down, I knew their plans for the use of adjuncts weren’t going anywhere. In that regard, being of the generation known as X has been a bit like being the baloney between a Boomer slice of bread and Millennial slice of bread crappy sandwich.