The Privilege of Believing in People

The Privilege of Believing in People

Every morning I sit on my farmer’s porch.

The first thing I notice is the green.

Not just a few green, but a hundred of them. The maple trees. The cottage garden. The milkweed I planted in the hope that monarch butterflies might someday find it.

A few days ago, one finally did.

I nearly cried.

Then I notice the porch.

The boards creak beneath my feet. The paint is peeling again. It’s an old house.

One hundred and twenty-five years of New England winters have a way of introducing themselves.

For weeks I’ve been scraping paint from the railings.

It’s slow work. Cathartic, mostly.

Slow enough that I managed to strain a muscle trying to save a porch that has been waiting years for someone to care for it.

Funny, in hindsight.

The birds don’t seem to mind.

Neither do the squirrels or the bees circling the fountain I installed this spring.

The porch has become my favorite room in the house.

It’s beautiful. But mostly, it’s quiet.

People walk past without looking up. I get to watch the world without asking it to watch me back.

Lately I’ve been thinking about maintenance.

Gardens don’t stay gardens because someone planted them once. Porches don’t stay standing because someone painted them twenty years ago.

The things we love ask something of us.

Water me. Repair me.

Believe I’ll bloom again next season.

Maybe that’s why I loved my work so much.

People are no different.

For years, I had the privilege of believing in them.

Students who weren’t sure they belonged in college. Employees who couldn’t yet see the leader everyone else would eventually meet.

There is something sacred about looking at another person and saying, I think you’re capable of more than you think you are.

Sometimes belief is all someone needs.

I never stopped being amazed by that.

I thought that privilege would be mine for the rest of my career. I was wrong.

The strange thing about houses is that they rarely collapse all at once.

Years ago we discovered a leak in the roof.

Eventually we repaired it. Problem solved.

Or so we thought.

Last week I walked into a room and found part of my ceiling on the floor.

The leak was gone. The damage wasn’t.

Water had been quietly working its way through the house long after the source had disappeared.

There are kinds of damage you don’t see until gravity introduces them.

I haven’t stopped thinking about that.

About all the things we mistake for being fixed simply because they’ve gone quiet.

About all the ways we convince ourselves that if we just keep maintaining something long enough,

eventually it will become what it used to be.

If my house could speak, I think it would tell me,

If you don’t take care of me, this will only get worse.

If I could answer, I’d probably say,

I’m sorry. I haven’t been taking care of you. I haven’t even been taking care of myself.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been grieving.

Not just a job.

Not even a career.

The loss of a future I had already started living inside.

The quiet certainty that I had found the place where I would spend the rest of my working life.

The privilege of believing in people without first wondering whether the place asking me to believe still deserved mine.

I don’t know what happens next.

I know how to repair old porches.

I know how to plant milkweed and wait for monarchs.

I know how to help someone believe they belong.

I just never imagined I would have to learn how to leave something I spent so many years trying to help preserve.

-N