Summer, 2024. Florida.

It was Fourth of July weekend when we moved from Florida to North Carolina. The move was a bit quick, but quite complicated. My wife was working her steady job that she enjoyed, but I was adrift. Couldn’t hold down a job. My journalism degree hadn’t been acquired yet.

In December 2019, I had a job I really liked working for a Gynecologist/Oncologist office. I handled the front end of the office, doing check-ins and scheduling and whatnot. I liked my coworkers and the hours were good. The office was about a mile and a half from my house. The problem was the pay. I was actually losing money by working there.

I was doing everything I could to get overtime. This was pre-covid, but the wages all around were still shit, for the most part. I did everything I could to make myself valuable and indispensable. The doctor’s schedule was always sorted out. The lobby was clean. I would reassure the modest women that yes, the doctor is female and no, I won’t be in there during your hoo-hah examination.

Again, the problem was the pay. I begged for a raise. I’m not ashamed to say that. I explained my situation and how much I liked the job. I even sort of semi-threatened how I didn’t want to have to start looking for another job. I was told that merit raises are once a year and everyone gets 2%. Inflation was at 2.8%, if my cursory research is correct. You cannot budget your way out of poverty (despite what the rich tell you). The economy doesn’t work that way.

So, I got a job at the post office. It was a hard decision because I really did like the office job. My family comes first, and we were really struggling. The post office only hires part time for mail carriers. Please be aware of that if you apply. I’m not sure about other positions, as none were available at the time. The pay was more than I had ever made before. During the training they dangled the promise of an eventual full-time position over your head like a golden carrot. The odds of ever getting a full-time job with them are quite low. That, they don’t tell you.

You’re hired to cover the one day a week a particular full-time carrier is off. No one is regularly scheduled on Sundays, but you can pick up some extra hours delivering Amazon shit. So, you’re guaranteed one day a week, and you have you take your own initiative to try and pick up extra days on other routes, due to illness or whatever.

The training went well. I even passed the road test driving that rolling coffin they call the LLV (Long Life Vehicle). No bells and/or whistles on that shitbox. No air conditioning. There was a little heater in case I wanted to all the moisture in my body to evaporate. According to the training, I’d show up, all the mail for my route would be in several of these big, heavy bins. I’d spend a couple hours sorting it so it could be delivered in the order the route dictated. Someone would come and load it into the mail truck, and I’d be on my way.

My first day with the trainer was also my last. In a weird twist, his route was through my dad’s neighborhood. He’d passed away already, but my stepmother still lived there. I discover at the end of the sorting process that there is no person that loads the bins. That was also my job. Apparently, there is a 75-pound lifting requirement for the job that I wasn’t told about. I’d had three back surgeries at this point, so lifting 4-6 70-pound bins 5 days a week was out of the question.

There was quite an argument between me and my almost boss. My point was that the lifting requirement should be listed in the job description, instead of fucking nowhere. He said there was a waiver I signed. I asked him to produce it. Oh? What’s that, you sweaty asshole? You can’t find it? I don’t think anyone in my training class had signed a waiver. There were several old and tiny people that probably would have said something.

So that was that. At least I got paid for the training.

“I’ll just try to get another office job. My resume and skillset should get me employed soon,” I said to myself in April of 2020.

The lockdowns really fucked us. Now my children were to enjoy “home school”, which is dumb anyway, but this was more “crisis schooling”. Thousands of jobs just disappeared. I ended up going to college and getting a degree at 40 because the financial aid would help keep us afloat. Thankfully my wife still kept her job. She had been working from home since 2015, so not too much changed for her.

Then things opened up a bit. I got a job at an inpatient mental health/addiction recovery “hospital”, doing patient intakes. My job was convincing people at their lowest moments to give up their life (and freedom) for up to 30 days and live in this place to get “help”.

Maybe there were some good people in that place that really wanted to help. The programs were designed to collect every penny from the insurance companies as possible. Normally I would applaud this type of activity, because insurance companies are terrible entities of greed and bureaucracy (yes, all of them). If the place was the beacon of health and wellness that the brochures said, it would have been great.

Most people left the same (or sometimes worse) as when they arrived. Every day was chipping away at my own mental health and my faith in humanity. I lasted about a year. The last straw was when they covered up a covid outbreak and still had us trying to get more patients in. I was really having a crisis. My own depression was getting harder to keep in check. One day at work, I was sitting at my desk and called my wife.

“I don’t know what to do. I hate it here. No one is really getting help, and now a whole unit of the facility has covid, including some of the employees. They still want us bringing people in.” I was out of ideas.

“Holy shit, that’s awful,” she knew I was pretty miserable, “I know you’re not happy.”

“I want to just walk out. I know we need the money. I hate this.” I remember my boss seeing me on my phone at the desk and glaring at me. I gave her a look that said I didn’t care.

“Just come home, baby. We’ll be ok. We always are. The money isn’t worth your mental health getting out of control.” She was right. She usually is, but this time especially.

“Ok, I’ll grab some lunch on the way home. We probably won’t be going out for a while.” Her laugh can still give me butterflies. Can still give me hope.

I took off my ID badge and laid it on my desk. I didn’t have any personal items there. That was how much I hated the place. Didn’t want any personal effects being tainted by its proximity. Picked up my lunchbox and walked out to the car.

“Hey, wait!” It was Cathy, one of my coworkers. She was one of the few that was genuinely trying to make a difference and help these people. She had a bleeding heart and would probably let half of these lost souls stay at her house if she had the space.

“You were really just going to walk out without saying goodbye? You shithead.” That was probably the first time I’d laughed at work in a month.

“I’m sorry, Cath,” I was trying not to get emotional, “I just can’t…”

“I know, I get it. Don’t be a stranger.”

“Keep fighting the good fight,” I told her.

Well, now what? I tried a few work from home jobs, but I just couldn’t adjust. The couple of jobs weren’t great, and I was not a great employee. I thought it would be easy, but I just couldn’t shake the idea that all of my snacks and video games were right there and I had to work instead.

This went on until March, 2024. My wife had just gotten a huge promotion, which helped because her bum of a husband (me) couldn’t hold down a job. But now she was making enough that I could do what I always wanted, be a stay-at-home dad. Money was still very tight, but we were surviving. Then one day my wife sent me an email.

What do you think of this house? It was a real estate listing for a house in North Carolina. She knew how much I loved North Carolina, we had lived here in a different area back in 2015-16, which is its own story.

“The house is absolutely perfect. But big, and expensive. My mother would cry for months if we moved the grandkids away again,” I said.

“Well…what if she came with us?” My wife seems to have forgotten how much my mother hates cold weather. I said as much.

“This isn’t like New York cold,” my wife reasoned, “There are four actual seasons.”

“Ok, but you’ll have to bring it up to her, I think she likes you more than me anyway.” I was trying not to get my hopes up.

The house was perfect. Two story (what my wife wanted), not in Florida (what I wanted), not super cold (what my mother wanted.) We left the baby with the in-laws and took the three older boys on a road trip to see the house. I’m not leaving my in-laws out. They are great in the way that they are not attached to any particular area. They’ll go where the grandkids are, especially not that they are retired. They’re already looking at land to purchase for some time in the next year or two.

We met with the real estate agent and pretended to look at a couple other houses, but we knew what we wanted. Surprisingly, it took little convincing to get Ma on board. My stepdad had passed a couple years back, leaving just her and my disabled younger brother in the house. I think she was ready for a change. Now we just needed $420,000.

“Ok, here’s the plan. We put our house on the market, and your mother puts hers on the market at the same time. We combine the sale of both houses and completely pay off the new house, leaving us with no mortgage.” Genius shit like this is why she’s in charge around here.

My mother’s house was built in the 70’s and had been paid off for a number of years. Our house was built in 2018 and had doubled in value, but we still owed a lot. We figured ours would sell first, and hers would take a bit longer. It was actually the opposite. She got an offer fairly quickly, and ours took forever.

Take the normal amount of stress with this kind of thing and double it. I was regretting quitting smoking at that point. We were on a deadline as the people that were selling the house we wanted were also on a deadline with their new house. We were running out of time to come up with the money, they were about to go with another buyer. Their house had only been on the market for one day before we jumped on it, but the process of selling our house was taking forever. The buyer for our house was from out of the country so there was different paperwork and so on.

Let’s fast forward to Fourth of July weekend, 2024. Remembering all that stress is making my butthole clench up. Things worked out and we made it literally one day before the financial deadline. One of the ways we made our move easier was to sell as much of our shit as possible. I’m talking bed frames, dressers, couches. Even kitchen appliances. That gave us some extra room on the moving trucks. Yes, there were two trucks because Jesus Christ how much shit do these kids need? The flipside of that is that we had to get a bunch of new shit. My wife, with her many talents is a pro at Facebook marketplace.

She was able to find many pieces of furniture for dirt cheap. Good stuff too, little to no bloodstains or cigarette burns. It was at one home where we had a fun and awkward conversation. We were buying a dresser from a couple that was selling their stuff, so they could move to Florida. The wife was really excited about this, the husband was not. He asked why we moved from Florida.

“Too fucking hot.” I was not shy about it.

“Well, it gets hot here,” he replied.

I pulled out my phone, the weather app still had Orlando as one of my saved locations. I showed him where we were in North Carolina. 91 degrees, about as high as it gets in this area. I showed him Orlando, 102, with the heat index making it feel like 107. That kind of heat just wants to push you down into the cracked earth. I told him it will still get a bit hotter before it cooled down into the high 90’s. He gave his wife a pointed look, she just went back inside.

That was the main reason I hate Florida. I know that climate change is real. You used to be able to play outside for hours. Without sunscreen. Doing that now is a gamble that could have you ending up with hair cancer. I’d been wanting to move for years. I couldn’t do another 90-degree Christmas.

Fast forward again to this last summer, 2026. My life is as close to perfect as it’s going to get. Maybe I don’t deserve it, maybe some would say I didn’t work hard enough for it. Either way, I do not take anything for granted. I am thankful for everything I have, and the people I get to have it with. But mostly, I’m thankful for four fucking seasons.

I love cold weather. The winters here are perfect. Lots of winter temperatures, maybe a little snow. The fall is cool and mild. The spring is light and breezy. Even the summer is great. Back in July, the temp was about 90. I was walking back home form the neighborhood pool with my three-year-old. It was hot, but not oppressive. There was a breeze, my son had his little sunglasses and flipflops walking beside me.

This was the summer of the movies. The summer I wished I’d had as a kid. The summer I’d been denied growing up in the sweltering Florida hellscape. This was some warmth on my face, cold pool water, cold drinks. Laughter, good company. Kids playing outside. Even when the season is about to change, I get excited, knowing it will be a different season, and not just more heat. I don’t miss Florida at all. I don’t have to wear sunscreen on Christmas Eve, or try to remember at Thanksgiving dinner if I put deodorant on my balls.