Three Dark Circles: Part 2

If I was ever going to catch up to my peers and become the real grown-up I longed to be—not necessarily in spirit, but most definitely in skill–I was going to need a crash course.  A Boot Camp for Adulthood, if you will. 

The perfect opportunity came when my husband and I became house parents at a large residential treatment facility for at-risk youth.  As we drove our U-Haul onto the organization’s immaculate grounds one late-summer day in 2008, I felt like I was stepping into a machine—an Adult-O-Matic of sorts.  I knew I would be knocking around in there a while, and who knew what kinds of bumps and bruises I’d incur along the way, but I told myself that if I could just keep my eyes on the prize, I would one day be able to step out on the other side of that machine closer to my goal of being a true grown-up than I had ever been before.

There were dozens of homes on the organization’s property, each occupied by a married couple.  In front of each house was a black, plastic sign with the couple’s last name and address inscribed on it in neat, white lettering.  The signs hung down from outcropping boards at the tops of tall wooden posts.  When a couple completed their certification at the end of the year, they would receive a small, black disc to nail to their post.  Some houses had as many as twenty discs polka-dotting the fronts and sides of their signposts, like dark merit-badges.  A few, like ours, had zero. 

I’ll never forget the first time we pulled in front of our house.  It looked so pristine from the outside, overlooking the city on top of a vibrant, green hill.  This was our home, ready and awaiting its two newest residents, with the sidewalk rolled out from the front door like some kind of grand, gray carpet.  There was an eerie kind of perfection about the whole scene.  At the end of the sidewalk, right next to the street, was our sign post.  

The blatant display of our last name upon the proud, little sign made the enormity our commitment all too real, but it wasn’t the sign that bothered me most.  It was the post, and the three dark circles of unfaded wood that ran down the front of it in a short, orderly line, like a traffic light made out of timber.  The round patches were darker than the rest of the post, but were in varying stages of discoloration, with the top one being the darkest and the bottom being the lightest, according to how long they’d been covered up by the previous couple’s certification disks.  I wished I could take some wood stain and paint right over the top of those annoying, sun-stenciled circles.  They were a constant reminder that we had shoes to fill. 

(To be concluded in part 3.  To view Part 1, click on the "Older Posts" link below.)