Good Times With Emily

I'm still in Canon City with Emz.

She finished her high school work last week!!!!!

We found that if you walk along her fence to the right spot, you can pick up the wireless signal from Burger King. Which is why I'm sitting out here in a coat on an old kitchen chair behind her garage.

Colorado has a beauty and an ugliness all its own. The sun comes up in glowing megawatts every morning, piercing the prisms in the bedroom window and sending rainbows all over the room, a wonderful thing to wake up to. Also, the fall leaves on the ground crackle and crunch like leaves in books. This is very cool.

However. Everything that isn't irrigated is dry and rocky. Like this vacant area behind the garage. Sandy soil with scribbly little brown attempts at vegetation.

So tomorrow I get to go back to Oregon, where the falling leaves are all wet and soggy, but where there are grasses and bushes and vines and trees everywhere.

Emily has been helping backstage with the Fremont Civic Theater's production of Annie, a dream come true for her--to be involved in a real drama--and for me--to see her well enough to commit to being there for practices and also to actually keep her commitments. Yesterday she and I went to see the performance (she had trained someone else to do her backstage duties of changing Grace's clothes in record time and taking the garbage can on and off the "apron"). The play was very well done and a wonderfully satisfying story. Annie herself was a tiny little thing in sausage curls who was unbelievably good at the role.

Afterwards, numerous people thanked Emily for all her hard work, which was probably more gratifying for me than her, and the director said she has Emily on her list for the Christmas performance.

Then, on another front, a second drama opportunity opened up yesterday when the directors for the church youth group's Christmas play told her they really need her expertise.

Which is all wonderful, except that it's not. Now that she is actually WELL (applause, hallelujahs, cannon blasts) and done with her schoolwork, she really needs to find a job if she wants to stay here in Canon City. Which she does, now that she has all these amazing opportunities and is feeling more connected with the church and community.

But unfortunately the job market is terrible. If anyone is hiring at all, they want someone over 21/with some college/who can lift 50 lbs/with lots of experience. She would qualify for a desk job or tutoring or writing, but we haven't found a thing in any of those fields.

So she feels like she's camped by the Red Sea, a place that feels very familiar to some of us.

Paul and I feel she needs to go back to Oregon for a month or so this winter to see if she could actually survive there now. And if she could, we'd love to have her at home again, and the opportunities for work and selling books and so on would be a lot greater because of all our connections. Of course, if she could be healthy in Oregon it would mean she could live pretty much anywhere. But she hates the thought of leaving Colorado when things are finally going so well.

So, yeah, yet another in a long line of lessons in faith and trust.

Oh--there was that one job offer I clicked on because they wanted actors and hey! you only had to be 16. I found this:

Quote of the Day:
"Actors wanted for "Town of Horrors" Halloween display. Must be willing to be loud and get in people's faces and scare them."