Life in a Northern Town

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately, and finally decided to make a post/braindump out of it.

As some of you know, in 2009 (wow, has it really been that long?) I quit my well-paying 9-to-5 job, first of all to go back to school, and subsequently to try to make a go at freelancing and novel-writing. (This part is still a work in progress.) I’m a fairly risk-averse person, have always been, and this was terrifying to me. Since I started working at the News-Miner in 1998, there had only been a period of a few months when I was unemployed, while I was changing jobs after moving to Illinois. This is mostly a case of “right place, right time” luck, as well as having a skill set, as a newspaper layout artist, that was, up to the mid-2000s, highly employable. (The fact that by the late 2000s this had stopped being true was one of the main factors in my decision to go back to college and finish my degree. A career that had seemed a guaranteed job ticket a decade earlier was now teetering on the brink of going the way of buggy whip manufacturers.)

I’d occasionally worked part-time while freelancing or working on my creative projects in my spare time, but not having a regular job at all was an order of magnitude more intimidating. I have a TON of respect for people who start their own businesses, all the more so for those who are single or the family’s major breadwinner, because I was in basically the best of all possible worlds as far as doing this (my spouse has a good-paying job with excellent job security and benefits) and it still felt like stepping off a cliff. Stepping off that cliff while being entirely responsible for keeping a roof over your head is something I have trouble contemplating.

Still, it’s been very interesting to suddenly, in my mid-30s, have a whole new world open up in front of me: the world of people who aren’t tied to a 9-to-5 work schedule. You wouldn’t think this would feel so life-changing for me, because I grew up in a household in which my parents were largely unemployed or self-employed throughout my entire childhood. As an adult, though, I had primarily been around other adults who were white-collar workers, like me. And I was married to one. It’s an oddly self-selecting thing, because when you work a 9 to 5, you mostly associate with other 9-to-5ers by pure happenstance. You’re just not in a position to meet people who are on a radically different schedule. I did, of course, have self-employed friends who were artists or old school buddies or whatnot, but I tended to see them on my schedule, rather than theirs. In a way, the difference between their lives and mine was largely invisible to me, because I was fixed to my schedule (free only on evenings and weekends; had to get to bed early to get up for work, etc).

And it’s a startling thing, now, to be exposed to a whole new demographic, a whole world of people who (for example) shop at the grocery store at 2 in the afternoon or 10 p.m. on a weeknight. And there are a lot of them! I don’t think I’d ever realized how many. There’s an interesting kind of tunnel vision you develop when you work a 9-to-5 job, where it feels like everyone else is doing the same thing (but only because that’s the people you largely associate with) and it seems as if having an employer and a 401K and a steady paycheck is the only path to adulthood. It’s not, of course, but once you’ve gotten into that lifestyle, it’s strangely difficult to think outside that box until you get out of it.

So, this afternoon, off and on, I’ve been hearing what sounds to me like a dog howling, somewhere in the neighborhood. But I can’t get a good fix on it, because I only ever heard it from inside the house, while I was doing something else. By the time I stopped to listen and open a window to see if I could hear it better, it had already stopped.

I kept trying to figure it out, because it’s really cold today (-20F or so) and I was worried that perhaps a neighbor dog had got caught in a trap or accidentally left outside or something. I couldn’t hear it well enough to tell for sure, though, and I wasn’t even 100% sure it was an animal, because sound carries a long way when it’s this cold, and I often mistake snowmobiles for animal sounds — their rising and falling pitch sounds animate, until I stop and listen and can tell for sure that it’s a snowmobile somewhere far off.

When I walked Lucky in the afternoon, I made a point of roaming around the edges of the property, hoping to hear the howling again (if it was howling) and get an idea of where it was coming from. At the edge of our driveway, I found the kind of tracks that I have, in the past, assumed are wolf tracks: enormous dog tracks (~5″ across) in a straight line, as wild canine tracks tend to be. In winters past, I’ve only ever found a single set, but this time I was pretty sure there were two different ones. But again, two of our neighbors have large dogs, and I wasn’t entirely sure it might not be them.

For some reason I didn’t put 2+2 together until I was out, again, with Lucky at dusk, and heard the howling again, and this time I heard it well enough to tell that it was two different howls responding to each other at different distances, catching and carrying on each other’s signal, as Huskies sometimes do. And then the penny dropped and I went “Oh!”

What I’ve been listening to all afternoon is wolf talk.

Of course, I could have done without having this epiphany at dusk, a quarter mile from the house. XD

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

SO. TIRED. Autumn is really hitting us with a vengeance, but I finally have nearly everything battened down for winter. I got the garden harvested on Friday, and then we were hit with our first frost Friday night (a major, unforecasted, plant-killing frost, too! If I’d been one day later with the harvesting … I definitely feel like I dodged that bullet by a hair!). The greenhouse is all cleaned up and ready for spring, the chickenhouse is repaired, tools and things are tucked away, we have a load of coal coming next week … there are still a few things I haven’t done (my planters of pansies are still blooming, so I think I’ll wait to put them away until they die back), but all in all, I think we’re basically ready for winter. Which is good, since it’s starting to look like it might be an early one.

On the creative front, I want to start making more posts about writing. This would be easier, I guess, if I was actually selling things, so I could announce story sales rather than just rambling about the writing process. But … I feel like I’m getting closer? I have a novel that I plan to start submitting to agents this winter (it still needs one more rewrite), a handful of short stories that are currently being shopped around, and a novella that I just finished rewriting this week. Sadly, the comics have been suffering, because I’m still having a lot of trouble shifting back and forth between “comics mode” and “prose mode”. I do plan to work on that! And to post more in this blog, in general.

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.