"So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!"
Six years ago today was a Thursday. I was settled into my tiny new office, wedged between the ladies bathroom and the copier room. It made for lots of social opportunities as our secretarial pool came to relieve themselves or pick up something off the printer. I tried working with the door closed, but the space turned into an ice box, a ten by ten room with four air conditioning registers blasting all the time.
We were wrestling through the early days of life together, P and I. We'd signed a contract on the house on Maritime Way, where you could hear and smell the gulf. We lived in a tiny rental generously made available by Gary, a longtime friend and now boss at the new firm. Shady Pines Drive. After work each day we walked down to the beach with a glass of wine, plopped down on a blanket on the sand, and toasted our amazingly good fortune.
Because this had been home only a few weeks before.
We were broken, trying to keep a stiff upper lip in the midst of all that destruction. A few weeks after the storm, Gary had invited me to lunch at Cowgirl Kitchen in Seagrove Beach. It was surreal for me; I'd been living in a garage apartment offered as a refuge by strangers with ties to the church, driving two hours each way through wreckage and snapped trees to sit in an office with a caved in lobby and no phones, then driving back. But here it was like nothing had happened, with happy people zipping by on golf carts, down from Atlanta or Nashville for an expensive vacation on the beach.
Gary suggested that if I ever grew tired of living this way, they could likely find a place for me at D&S. So I came, initially feeling quite guilty about leaving Panama City when the town was flat on its back. But even back then I was feeling the shadows of this life beginning to grow longer, and didn't think there was much chance things would get back to normal there anytime soon. We started over, trying to fit in among the beautiful people in south Walton.
That lasted, as it turned out, almost exactly a year. When the pandemic swept across the planet I learned to work remotely from the farm, after having developed a deep dislike of the crowded, rootless, entitled vibe on 30A. As it turned out, I would never return to that old office in Walton County. Yet the guys in the firm didn't raise a fuss, except the occasional ribbing about never coming to work, and a cardboard cutout of me they'd stick in my chair during partners' meetings.
The remote work led to splitting time in upstate New York while Peg worked up here. When I sensed that my practice was starting to suffer from not having a PC office, the firm let me open one, even though I still wasn't around all that much. Then we navigated a complicated merger that greatly expanded the punch of the firm in Bay County. I didn't ask to be deeply involved in negotiating that deal, and they didn't offer. I reckon you could already see the drift apart starting to happen.
Then in the last few weeks of 2024 it hit me like a freight train that I didn't want to practice this way anymore, didn't want the constant worry and supervisory headaches. It just organically felt like time to slow down. What happened? The election probably had something to do with it--I've developed a pretty deep pessimism about this time and place, and for my own sanity I've withdrawn, as have a lot of people it seems.
It's also just time. "Why in the hell are you working at all?" one of my oldest and best lawyer friends asked a few days ago. Alimony, I guess. Plus, what would I do if I didn't work at least a little? P and I both pour so much of our identities into our professional persona that I think we'd both be adrift without having at least a toe in the water.
So today's my last day with D&S, six years and one month of a roller coaster ride through this season of life, beginning by emerging from the wreckage of a Category Five hurricane, and now remotely working from a dim, antique-filled office in a place in New York I couldn't have found on a map just a few years ago. It's been an adventure, Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, and looking back I'm grateful for all of it.
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