#10 - Year Without A Summer

The whole world ended.

But before that, an asteroid called graduation struck the earth, triggering the onset of an ice age that killed all the fun. Friends disappeared. Job openings froze up. I moved home. I watched The Price Is Right.

A month passed, and my dad suggested I look for something part-time.

“You can earn a little money, get a little experience under your belt. Might as well be productive while you look for your ideal job, right?”

The next day, he told me about Tina the Landscaper. For two years she’d been mowing the lawn at his dental practice.

“She said she’s looking for extra help over the summer. Decent hours. Outdoor work. She’s a nice lady.”

He had a business card, so I called the number. Tina said yes, she was looking for extra help during the summer. She said previous landscaping experience wasn’t necessary. She said she needed me on her lawn crew. She said she’d pay ten bucks an hour. She said I could start on Monday.

Before meeting her, I had imagined two Tinas. Tina number one (the more likely Tina, I believed) was six feet tall, wore camo overalls, and had a haircut like Chuck Norris. Tina number two (the Tina I was hoping for) looked like Jessica Alba. Of course, the real Tina looked like neither of my imagined Tinas. Instead, she turned out to look like a mom wearing knee-length shorts and a short sleeved work shirt. For some reason, the moment I first saw her, I thought of a Yellowstone Park Ranger. (I’ve never been to Yellowstone.)

That first day I spent most of my shift running a weedeater. A guy named Henry trained me on the self-propelled mowers in the afternoon. I earned seventy bucks and a sunburn. That night I told my dad that my ideal job was any job other than working for Tina.

But of course, I needed money. I needed the exercise. And I needed to stop watching daytime television. I had all the commercials memorized; lawyers, technical schools, insurance for old people. I could quote them.

So, I mowed. I slashed weeds. I spread fertilizer and insecticide. I drove a white pickup. I got a tan (sort of). Most importantly, I got paid.

On the tenth of June, Tina told me she needed me to help with a landscaping project on the west side of town. The break from lawn care sounded nice, so I was happy to oblige. We loaded her truck with all the heavy tools we needed, filled up a cooler with ice and bottled water, and headed to the site just after seven in the morning, with Jon and Grant following us in a second truck.

Tina liked listening to country music, so that’s what was playing on the radio when the guy (I know his name, but I don’t like repeating it) swerved and hit us. He was responding to a text from his wife. I’m sure he was a decent guy. He didn’t want to kill Tina, but he did.

I was out cold, I guess. I’ve heard the stories of what happened in the days and weeks and months after the accident, but it all feels like fiction to me. Tina died. The guy died. Funerals were held for both of them. My parents’ church held a prayer vigil for me. And of course, lots of important stuff happened regardless of whether I was aware of it or not.

I was in a coma for a hundred and twenty six days. Two memories remain from that time period. The first is of a crowded room. My family and friends were there and I could smell cinnamon. I recognized the voices, but couldn’t understand what was being said. It felt like Christmas. Later, when I described this memory to my mom, she said there was never more than three people in the room with me, and that as far as she knew there’d never been any cinnamon.

The second memory is very vague. There was one person in the room with me. I didn’t recognize his voice. I could feel him close to my face, though I couldn’t see him. He said many things, but I only remember one sentence: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

After I woke up, my mom told me that’s a line from the Bible. Some angels said it when women came to look for the body of Jesus. He wasn’t there.

Of course, in my case my body was there, but I wasn’t.

Two weeks after leaving the hospital, I met Tina’s family. Her husband, her two daughters. We sat in my parents’ living room. The girls didn’t say anything, but when their father cried, they cried. I told them I was sorry. Her husband said he was sorry. Sorry for everything that had happened to everybody. He said it was nice to see me, and to know that I was with Tina when she passed.

I said, “I don’t remember anything.”

He said, “That’s okay. You were there.”

I didn’t really know Tina, but I guess the fact that she died next to me connected us somehow. Her husband gave me a hug before he left. It was awkward because I was in the wheelchair and my arms just kind of hung there.

A few weeks later, Tina’s older daughter added me as a friend on Facebook. Weird. Yeah.

That was just about the time we got our first snow of the year. The green world I’d said goodbye to in June had suddenly turned all white. And I was still watching The Price Is Right.

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To learn more about the Year Without A Summer, read the original Wikipedia article HERE.