Excerpt: Confessions of a REAL Working Girl

The city makes weird noises.

There is a point in time every autumn and every spring, but more so in the autumn I think, where it is too cool for the air conditioning and too warm for heat. A reluctance I think to change what doesn’t need to be changed. It is the moment where I’ve forgotten anything but the clean and fresh outdoor air. The pavement wet from the rain. I forget that this fresh air is unmistakably tinged with the scent of humanity. I forget that the city has bugs and other things that fly through the air. And less than I forget, I simply don’t care because it is, after all, the wonderful outdoor air that I am letting in.
So, in that moment of forgetting, in that moment of in-between hot and cold, in that moment of wanting to connect with something beyond the four walls of my apartment, I open the door to my balcony.
And I am reminded.
The city is many things. But most of all it is noisy.
And in that moment I just don’t care. Because for a girl raised in the swamps in a town with gas stations and fishermen, and teachers in a school with one class per grade, with one grocery store and the High’s where ice cream bars were numerous, and two churches in town where everyone went except for the few devout Catholics who travelled 30 minutes to attend mass and the even fewer who didn’t attend at all, the city is a wondrous place.