Beginning the Best Year

This is pretty new to me. Not the writing part — I’ve been doing that for the better part of my life, but the whole having an audience thing. It’s a little strange, writing something that belongs to just me while knowing that in not too long, others will read it, and it will belong to them, too.

My name is Mia Timlin, I’m 17 years old, and Cape Girardeau is just the most recent place in a string of towns and states I’ve gotten to call home. Right now, my days are spent getting ready to start my senior year, trying to balance working with my summer schedule and spending an obscene amount of time reading. I’m a dancer, an artist, a writer and someone who loves to sing, even though I’m not particularly good at it. I love to read on my front porch when it rains, and I like to pretend I’m the only person in the world experiencing something, even when I know I’m not. I’m also extremely hopeful for this next year. I’m excited to make something through writing this column that I think is going to help me grow as a writer, an observer and as a teenager trying to juggle a thousand things while living in times like no other.

Right now, I have a summer job working at Ty’s Summer Sno. It’s basically something from a teenage summertime movie, with the brightly-colored work shirts, ridiculously huge snow cones and the regular customers whose orders can be anticipated before they’re even spoken. My grandma loves to talk about when she was my age, working behind the counter at a soda shop, making two bucks an hour and rushing to the store from school each day before all of the kids from the public school across the street would flock there to get cherry and vanilla Cokes.

On the other end of the teenage job spectrum are the stories of my grandpa’s odd jobs from growing up in New York City. They range from cleaning sixth-story windows and being responsible for the apartment broiler at age 11, to transporting groceries up endless flights of stairs for a quarter and carting boxes around the Garment District. At my age, he was working in a plastics factory and making four dollars an hour. I’m beyond grateful my summer job has gone more the route of my grandmother’s, and that the issue of potentially falling from a sixth-story window ledge hasn’t arisen in the electric blue snow cone hut I work in.

My senior year will be starting up in about a month, and I’m trying to spend the last weeks of summer enjoying the bits of calm I can find. It won’t be long before the whirlwind of attempting to plan an entire future will come in stronger than it ever has. Until then, I’ll be making snow cones, driving across the East Coast with my family, reading everything I can get my hands on and thinking about what I’m going to say to you next month.