Contingent: an adjunct essay in Parts

Part 1: September 18, Fall 2025

In class today, a student mentioned she struggled with metaphor. Pay attention to the world, I told her. Metaphors are everywhere, waiting for us to recognize, in them, our own humanity. There is a metaphor in front of you to suit any experience, the very minute you experience it, if you adjust your vision and tune into the world.

A month ago, after a third gentle nudge from our neighbor about the aging horse chestnut tree falling on our house—particularly our son, Johnny’s, room—I emailed the former mayor about the tree, which was on village property. The horse chestnut had long turned dark and scaly, spilled chestnuts the kids once collected in competition. I’m certain, in winter, when anyone in our family sat on the toilet in the upstairs bathroom, we admired the tree’s witchy branches on the white sky.

For years, the tree dropped arms and fingers in temperamental fists-full during storms. From the stop sign at the corner, the tree is only a giant stick with one long arm holding a mess of rotting limbs. Minutes after my email, a crew from the Department of Public Works, much to our German Shepherds’ dismay, set up shop beneath the tree and went to work, slicing the tree’s few remaining branches.

This fall is my 35th semester of teaching part-time at my alma mater. This seemed a privilege for a long time, to afford to be so broke—we had excellent SUNY-provided healthcare for emergency c-sections, childhood illnesses, broken bones, and to manage multiple sclerosis, the disease I was diagnosed with during grad school. If I divided my pay by hours worked, I made less than minimum wage. Still, I could get an MRI without a bill for $5k arriving in our mailbox. I taught part-time before and during my sons’ school days, which meant less childcare cost, and though summers meant no pay, I was home for long, sunny days with John and Sam. I taught through blinding, dizzying, limping relapses and med changes and volunteering in my sons’ elementary classrooms. I taught while I completed an MFAW at Goddard College, served as village historian, and wrote two books. When I finally qualified as a public servant, my mound of student debt that $30k of payments hadn’t touched, was forgiven.

Most important was what teaching taught me about family, friends, and especially, my sons. Teaching meant meeting people where they are, where their life has taken them. For writing, it meant reading distant drafts and asking people to share their sensory, concrete experience, to invite the reader along. This is how we connect.

Semesters passed alongside our sons’ hockey tournaments and practices, morning ball-throwing for the shepherds, dinner after dinner after dinner, and several interviews at my alma mater for full-time positions both academic and professional that never manifested, nearly leveling me entirely. For so many years, I struggled to keep my labor in the realm of part-time, commensurate with my pay. But in my mind, I thought, No experience wasted. I was compelled to do things that weren’t asked of me because they were part of the fuller creative life I wanted to live.

Over the past two years, my body began to revolt, letting me down unexpectedly, shaking my confidence in the classroom. Sentences occasionally dropped out from under me. Sloppy handwriting on the classroom white boards and a full coffee enthusiastically knocked from my desk and across campus were the least of my worries. My insurance company no longer wanted to cover my meds. I had to come to terms with my place in my body and my place in a role I had outgrown.

This summer, a friend and former colleague confirmed for me, You have to leave, something my mother told me several semesters ago, and again every semester after, each time I had to wait over a month for my first paycheck of the academic year.Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? my mother would say.

The problem with systems is we’re all inside with faces we know. By being inside them, we hold them up.

Life is complicated. I have “paid my dues” in the way I wanted to—editing and directing literary journals, advising the student-run literary magazine, mentoring students, taking on independent developmental editing projects, and offering independent studies in Writing Illness and Therapeutic Writing on the side. Our sons have grown taller than I am, have become evidence of our dreams. Nothing has been a waste.

This week, as in many moments of worry, I end up at my parents’ house half a block away. with a cup of coffee, staring into my mother’s face:

“Sarah, you have to just do it. You know you can do it, don’t you? Don’t you have faith in yourself? Don’t you?” she asks.

I promise myself: late January will arrive, and for the first time in my professional life, I won’t step into the classroom.

I return home, and the space in front of our house still boasts construction. Flags mark the gas line, the horse chestnut stump has been ground out, and the mulch pulled away. In an entirely unrelated project, the cracked sidewalk leading to our house has been dug out and prepared for the pouring of fresh concrete. In the coming weeks, our neighbors and friends will learn to use a John Deere and dig, expanding their driveway to our property line.

This journey has been long on exposition, light on external conflict, heavy on internal conflict, the epiphany gathering as I meet the mess of restarting. I have prepared for a career working with writers one-on-one, helping each tell their story. I’ll help writers navigate gritty terrain, mine what’s useful, process human experience, write beautiful books. This is where my life has taken me.

Don’t you have faith in yourself? echoes in my mind while I stare at the barriers in place of our sidewalk, and again, as I water the last of the tomatoes.

Tomorrow, in class, almost as if I planned it this way, we’ll discuss metaphor as written by Maggie Smith in Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, which I highly recommend.

Each morning, I wake, my gut making grumbly, cinching noises, my jaw a vice grip, heart racing, the air around me always buzzy.

The construction will end eventually. No tree shades us from the late summer sun, but the former mayor emailed just now: they’re planning for a Silver Linden in front of our house this fall.