Happy Labor Day!

Hello, tender friends!

Let’s celebrate Labor Day by sharing stories of fun jobs we’ve had. I always love to hear what people do day-to-day at their job, so I took a trip down memory lane to remember jobs that I’ve loved over the years.

Ok, let’s start with my first job other than babysitting.

This was at an ice cream shop my freshman year of high school. I have been holding in the secret of how to make a beautiful sundae for…25 years, and now it’s time to finally share.

The trick to making whipped cream look good when making an ice cream sundae is to move the dish around but keep the hand holding the whipped cream steady.

At the risk of sounding conceited about my sundae-making skills, the stock photo above is just ok….I would have definitely put more whipped cream around the base, as the sprinkles look better against the white background. At the ice cream shop, we lived by the maxim, “If it looks good, it tastes better.” We all poured our hearts and souls into making everything as pretty as possible.

I loved that job and the girls I worked with. When you’re 15, eating ice cream while sweeping the floor and closing out the register at your part-time job with your friends is fun.

I similarly loved all the other service jobs I had throughout high school and college: setting up the snow tubing lane at the ski resort down the road from my house and running inside to rentals throughout my shift to make out with my boyfriend who worked there, bar tending, waitressing and working the bev cart at a golf course.

I loved all those jobs. I loved the hustle of working food service, loved talking to the girls I worked with because we all became friends even if we didn’t start out as friends, and I loved having a concrete set of tasks to check off a list and be “done” at the end of the day.

I even loved my job teaching English as a Foreign Language when I lived in Barcelona. I taught mostly adult students, and we became friends over the academic year.

Sometimes the more affluent business men treated me to dinners out in places I’d never be able to afford on my teacher’s salary, but never in a creepy way. They framed it as me helping them out by speaking English to them over an expensive dinner, but the truth is they knew I didn’t make that much money and were trying to make sure I experienced the finer things of Barcelona.

I don’t have any photos from that time in Spain, as they’ve been lost over the years, but this is an internet photo from Boca Chica, a trendy restaurant in Barcelona and similar to places I ate when my students treated me.

People tried to feed me everywhere I went in Spain, and I’ve never forgotten the feeling of being cared for by strangers. When people try to convince you that people suck or the world is a terrible place, I feel baffled. Maybe I’ve received more than my fair share of kindness in life, but I’ve always found humanity to be a stellar thing. God saw all that he had made, and he said it was GOOD, remember?

And my current writing job? I love that too. I’m still trying to turn it into a full-time gig, but haven’t yet.

Here’s a home I wrote about back in March that was beautiful if you want to look at the pictures. It was a tremendous honor to be able to write about this couple’s son who passed away in his 20s, and I was proud of the semi-circular structure I used to implicitly refer to him at the end.

https://theroanoker.com/magazine/home-and-garden/home-of-glamour-and-gathering/

While it hasn’t paid all my bills yet, it has been a great privilege to be entrusted with other people’s stories, and it’s one I don’t take lightly.

Ok, that’s all for today, tender friends! I hope your employment, whether current or past, has blessed you as I’ve been blessed by these things. I want to end on a high note, so I’ll leave these here now and share about the job I have never loved next week, as I’m still brainstorming ways to make it a more positive experience.

Thank you for stopping by, and thank you for sharing!

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