no holidays

Yesterday finally finished a major rush of seasonal work: six weeks, seven days a week, at three jobs. Gotta follow the work when it comes around! And I'm sure enough grateful for it, too. Even more so after about eleven hours of sleep.

My last day of Valentine flower deliveries was, surprisingly, the most satisfying. All week it was roses by the dozen, plush animals and chocolate to offices and homes. Yesterday, I got the deliveries for the workers. The ones who live in a world where holidays don't have quite the same meaning. Making your living in a service industry means that all these days which society at large calls "special" are days that you will spend in attendance on that society, enabling it to be "special" for them. Yesterday I went to Target, Applebees, and Taco Bell. I took roses to women on the staff of a hospital and a nursing home. It was a great reminder: it's not only our expectations about holidays that are being preserved by the hard work of many, mostly invisible, members of a community. It's also the much more basic and essential needs of safety, health, emergency service. Supports that probably even those of us who work holidays take for granted, as somewhat-members of a somewhat-functional society. I'll remember it a little more, after yesterday. Maybe send more thoughts out to those laborers of all kinds. Even on days when I'm at work along with them.