The Life of a Trucker
When I was younger, I always had this second Mom roaming around. My sister, Katie, is thirteen years older than me, and as I grew I wondered, what’s the point of having an older sister if she’s just going to play mini Mom? Well, over time, my sister and I grew closer and closer, and as I blossomed into a young woman, her wisdom and spirit stuck with me, shaping me into who I am today.
Katie has never been one to back away from a challenge. You tell her she can’t do something, give her a month and she’ll have run circles around anyone that doubted her, and that’s exactly what happened with truck driving. When she told me she was leaving her long-time job at Apple to get her CDL’s, I was probably the most confused I’d ever been. I thought she loved her job at Apple, and for a while she did, but sitting at home all day walking people through how to troubleshoot their iPads and get their AirPods connected isn’t exciting and gets annoying pretty quickly. So, she went to the only experts she knew in the field, our uncles.
They were absolutely stoked. They knew if anyone could do it, it would be Katie. I saw a fire I’d never seen in any of them before. My uncles rotated their times coming home so someone would always be here to help her study and show her the ropes. They would circle the truck for hours, each time finding something new to teach her, and she learned fast. Before I knew it, she was going on her first partnered ride, and then, she got her own truck.
Her trucking journey so far has been amazing. Every time I see her she can’t help but gush about how beautiful all the states are, how she can’t wait to take my cousin and I on a Girls Trip through the country. It was definitely hard at first, we were used to seeing her all the time, and now it was down to a week every two months, and that’s a maybe. But, we love that she’d found her calling, and I’ll be sure to remember whenever I don’t know what to do with life, I can always have my big sister to guide me and prove that if I’m not happy with what I’m doing, I can always go do something else.
