It’s now going on eight months since I was laid off. I had hoped to use my severance time to reflect on what seemed important moving forward and to gain some clarity about what I wanted from my next job during this forced time off. To some extent, I have — I’d like to stay with a mission-driven nonprofit, I’d like to earn a living wage with just one job (those two things often seem surprisingly at odd with one another), I’d like writing to be part of my responsibilities, and I’d love for it to focus on books or literacy in some way. In other ways, though, what I’m looking for remains as mysterious as it did in my first days of unemployment.

So far what you can say about the jobs I’ve applied for is that they are all at nonprofits and most of them involve writing in some way. (I have deviated from that only when the ability to focus on reading is an option.)

The next wave of jobs I’ve bookmarked ask you to send in a writing sample as part of the application, which has required me to revisit the material I’ve put out into the world over the past two decades. Some of it I remember quite vividly; a series of plain language health books and a couple of alumni interviews stood out. But a lot of my writing was done rather anonymously, under the general authorship of my project website. What this means is that it’s not enough to Google my name and see what comes up; I have to go back to the website and page through nearly 500 posts to see what stands out enough to be included in a writing portfolio of sorts.

It’s been illuminating. I often tell people that I don’t love writing, but I love having written. I definitely didn’t love being limited to writing about science, because that was never where my passion or my comfort levels were. It always seemed to require a lot of research to learn about something first, before I could capably explain it to my target audience of middle schoolers. But in the end, what I’m seeing and what I didn’t always appreciate in the moment, is that my job afforded me a lot of freedom to find things interesting or curious and to explore why that was and what might make someone else find it so. I’ve written about a lot of interesting things, from space to endangered species to engineering and from current scientific events and breakthroughs to famous dead people (and non-famous dead people I thought you should know more about). Mostly the prose is straightforward; I’m definitely not winning any contests for compelling posts. But most of them served their purpose — to educate — and even, on rare occasion, broke the barrier into inspiring reading.

This was all for a job that I didn’t love and that I never would have picked if a temp agency hadn’t dropped me on their doorstep.

So, if I can find things to be proud of — and that stand up years later as being worthy of reading — then I think that wherever I land next will also be fine, even if it doesn’t seem like the ideal fit at the outset. There will be things I won’t love about any job, but maybe what this shows is that there will also be things that I do.

Merriweather Post has some great sculptures and I captured two with the waxing gibbous moon:

When I’m working at the park, this is often what my kit looks like.

Obviously the laptop, which is hooked up to my cell phone hotspot to provide internet, is the most crucial item.

I bring a thermos of tea and a bottle of chilled water and a snack/lunch for sustenance. Today, it was peanut butter and graham crackers. Sometimes it’s yogurt. Other times it’s a bagel.

For protection and comfort, I have sunglasses, sunscreen, and bug spray (although I try to sit at a picnic table under the trees and they spray for mosquitoes at the park, but that doesn’t stop the no-see-ums from chewing on me).

And there’s reading material (and, inside the wicker tote, headphones and a knitting project), although none of that is guaranteed to be used. But it makes me feel better about things.

When you work outside (in your backyard, maybe, if you have one), what do you always have with you?

The coffee house with the best late evening exposure (and the nicest baristas) near us has created some beautiful planter boxes to demarcate their outdoor seating area. They’re filled with cheerful and colorful plants like petra croton and purple heart and flowering plants. Today it rained off and on, but eventually the skies cleared and Rudi and I headed over to the cafe to read away the final 90 minutes of daylight.

While there, I noticed the purple hearts were filled with water and that the water was filled with rooftops. (You’ll need to click through to Flickr and zoom in if you want to see the latter.)

I love seeing the world contained in a single drop of water.

While yesterday was a bit of a letdown, with the job search getting in the way of having fun, today was far better.

It started with a trip to the farmers market. No raspberries to be seen, but we bought both cherries and strawberries.

We watched Nadal win the French Open and the English women beat the Scots.

We tried a new ice cream shop.

We headed up to the bookstore and, thanks to a gift certificate from my brother, came home with a new cookbook and new music and a new Peter Mayle collection.

I harvested my first (tiny) tomato from the garden in the mist and sorted out my greens and brought home herbs for supper (eggs, roasted new potatoes with rosemary, and the first green beans of the market season, cooked with herbes de Provence we bought on our trip to the region a decade ago).

The day concluded with The Tonys and strawberries and cream and some late night reading.

It was a good weekend.

How was yours?

When I was out on Thursday, I stopped at Trader Joe’s and they had just gotten in an enormous and gorgeous shipment of pink peonies. A bouquet was slightly more than I would have paid under normal circumstances, but it was clear they were fresh and they looked likely to last for several days. And, honestly, they were just so colorful and I knew they’d be beautiful when they opened, which they are.