As the school year winds down at the university, I find myself in an unusual position. I don’t have a job this summer. And what’s more, I don’t HAVE to have a job this summer. Woah.

            I have worked every summer since I was fourteen when my mom hired me to do the weekly house cleaning and laundry. My older brother was off working at the college library (where I would soon follow to work each summer during high school), so I had the house to myself all summer long.

I learned how to do laundry (no electric dryers for us—we were clothesline people), how to iron, and how to use that strange brushy attachment on the vacuum.

            The summers following I worked at the local college library, a movie theater, an art gallery, a history museum, and a country club.

These were all fairly typical high school/college part-time jobs that earned me a few extra bucks for clothes and books. They weren’t what I would call ‘high stakes’ jobs. Those were the jobs that came later when I needed money for food and rent.

            In graduate school, I was only paid nine months out of the year for teaching. In order to feed and house myself during the slim summer months, I had to find part-time work.

            But who was going to hire and train a grad student for only three months of work? It wasn’t Microsoft, The New Yorker, or the Modern Language Association.

First, I sold newspaper subscriptions door-to-door. After being chased by dogs and having doors slammed in my face, I tried selling subscriptions by phone. Yes, I admit it; I was an annoying telemarketer.

I only lasted a month with that job. I quit after a woman on the phone called me pathetic and told me to find a real job. I wish I could find her today to show her that I have found a real job and to say, “Yeah, and that’s Doctor to you, missy!”

            The summer after beginning my Ph.D. program, I worked in the wheat fields of the Palouse in Washington. I got my own leather work gloves and a beat-up 1971 Dodge pick-up we nicknamed “The Dog.” I weeded the plots in pouring rain and hand-harvested them in 100 degree heat. I will never forget that blistering day of harvesting when we sat under the thresher of the combine (the only shade available) to eat our sack lunches.

            That summer I also cleaned up doggie doo. I helped take care of 100 female beagles, and my primary responsibility after feeding them was to clean up what they produced after food consumption. At this job, I got my own jumpsuit and a sturdy pair of rubber boots.

            Since then, I’ve managed to score significantly cleaner jobs teaching summer school classes and doing temporary secretarial work on campus, but I’ve found that nothing could really match my experience of that first summer in my doctoral program.

            Working in the fields and cleaning up after animals is hard, sometimes back breaking work. At night, I coated my hands with shea butter lotion and slept in white cotton gloves to keep my hands from cracking from the repetitive motion of pulling up cheat grass or from being wet for hours as I hosed down dog kennels.

            I needed every hour of work I could get to make my rent and keep the electricity on, so I never called in sick or left early because I couldn’t stand the smell of myself.

            Yet there was something strangely satisfying about this work. Maybe it’s because I knew the jobs were temporary and the fall term would bring back my graduate stipend, maybe it’s because the smell of ozone on the Palouse always made me stop weeding and stand up to watch as a storm rolled in, or maybe it was the pack of warm beagles who would always come running after I called, “Who wants some love?”

            Whatever the reason, I find myself thinking fondly of that summer when spring semester ends. The truth is that I think I valued those jobs because I realized I could eke out a living with my hands.

But the intellectual work I will do as a scholar this summer (publish or perish, baby) is so very different (though some might argue that I am shoveling a different kind of poo).

Instead of seeing tidy rows of weed-free wheat, I’ll see lines of Times Roman, 12-point font letters, spelling out my latest theories about Shakespeare. Instead of feeling doggie noses on the backs of my knees, I’ll feel the cracked spine of a well-worn text I’ll reread for next fall’s classes.

Intellectual work is actually no less tactile than the work of my previous summers. And intellectual work is WORK. I may not need Ben Gay after a day of reading and writing, but I do need some respite (usually a long, hot soak in my tub) after hours of thinking about and creating words.

Today I am fortunate to be able to choose this intellectual work over the field work. The field work sustained my physical body by keeping me fed and clothed, but the intellectual work feeds my soul.

The intellectual work gives me language to understand what I have to offer as a human being to this planet. The intellectual work shows me that language is what connects us all. Intellectual work is my job, no matter the season.

Now I think I finally know what it means to have a career and not just a job. Careers are something you carry with you all day, all year. And they don’t smell.