Ch 15: Duck! Duck!

Sometimes laughter snatches the cloth off of the truth and leaves only threads behind.

After her firing, Anne never tried to find a job in academia again (see Ch 14 Straightening Up). She knew she couldn’t handle a third strike—a third assault on her professionalism, her integrity, and the career she loved. Instead, she spent her first year in Michigan collecting unemployment from her Massachusetts disaster. She sat for hours staring out the window at the snow blowing across the cornfields behind the house we rented, something she referred to as “living in the tundra”—a far cry from her beloved New England. 

We picked this house because it was as far away as possible from the non-profit where I worked while still meeting my board’s requirement of living in the county. We didn’t want to run into board members or clients at the grocery store and have to explain why we were together. Living in the middle of nowhere lowered that risk.