Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
We pinned a world map to the living room wall. It guides our fingers and our eyes when we trace our neighbor’s travels or the origins of our takeout spring rolls. The radius of our life spans less than an inch on one pink edge, missing the rainbow sprawl of continents, canals, deserts, and seas.
The tax on growing older is an unsettling measure of frugality and caution.
It also demands a revised dictionary.
Continue reading “56. Things I Can Read: The Travel Section”
When you find $20 in your jeans you forgot was there, it’s win. Even if you don’t believe in karma, luck, or any other breed of metaphysical sentience, your rationality clocks out for its afternoon break. Someone out there has pinned a blue ribbon to your chest and given you a thump on the back. “Today, you get the prize.”
Why, you might ask?
“Oh, just because you’re you. And you deserve it. Let’s leave it at that.”
There’s a bounce in your bones when you stroll out the door. Continue reading “10. Things I Can Find: Riches”
Three weeks makes the difference. Twenty days of walking past the 7-11 with my own coffee has settled me into a habit of ignoring temptation. The devil and angel are no longer battling it out for my attention and my cash.
To consistently stop (or start) doing something for about a month seems to be what it takes to erase the pesky decision point and establish a new routine. This applies well beyond money. Take the stairs, stop playing brainless games on the phone, speak an affirmation, no sweets after 8pm. It’s not necessary to waste brain space considering the alternative. The new way is just The Way.
In two days, the financial fast ends. The exercise has worked wonders in our little family. Friends came for dinner one weekend and for board games another, giving us an excuse to pretty up our home instead of going out. On our quieter evenings, Bug and I read together and made art. The credit card bill has never been so low.
Tonight, with spending tamed for the time being, I dare to tackle the dreaded late winter chore: installing Turbo Tax.
Yep, this is Friday night in our rock-n-roll household.
At two hours past bedtime, Bug is still playing Minecraft on the couch. Meanwhile, the software whirs on my computer, masticating numbers and spitting out financial data with about as much compassion as a bathroom scale. I sip chamomile tea and brace myself for the blow.
Which turns out to be a sweet nothing.
For this odd, impossible moment, we have a clean bill of health.
The numbers have to spin and calculate two or three more times before I believe them. It doesn’t compute. It’s Tee’s year to name our boy both as a dependent and as a child care expense (tax code is a strange tongue for speaking human worth), so he’ll be absent from my return. This should mean I owe big money. I have to cut a sizable check each alternating year even though my salary is already stretched so thin, you can see the writing on the Goodwill tags.
This year, Turbo Tax tells me we may end up with an actual refund. Ten bucks or so, but still.
Event the slowest learners stumble into awareness eventually, so long as they keep plugging away. Five years into this single-parent deal, and I’m starting to figure a few things out.
Apparently, owning a condo means something other than crippling mortgage payments and neighbors reorganizing their anvils at 1:00 in the morning. It comes as a shock to exactly no one but me that mortgage interest is deductible. Sure, the bank makes off like a mob boss with a bag full of interest each month, but enduring the extortion means a smidgen of year-end relief in the form of a small credit back to moi.
Then we’re looking at the retirement account. This year, my income is higher than it’s ever been in my life (which isn’t saying much). I took on a few teaching gigs and an extra set of tasks at work, negotiating a temporary bump in pay. As December rolled around, I remembered it was Tee’s year to claim our boy, so I sent the paperwork to HR to take my entire salary for two pay periods and dumped it into pre-tax retirement. I came home and gritted my teeth as I wrote out a check with too many zeros and put it my traditional IRA.
This shell game wouldn’t have been possible without the few thousand liquid bucks chilling in my checking account. This is where the financial fast — and frugality in general — makes its mark. Forgo a takeout pizza here, a movie ticket there. . . In my non-child-claiming tax years, the spare change adds up and can land with a little weight in my retirement account. Thrift allows me to stockpile not only the upfront dollars but the deferred cash I would have had to pay in taxes on a higher income.
Sure, these scarily big deposits took a bite out of my checking account. But the pain paid off, quite literally. A lower income figure on my W-2 translated into a tax savings of nearly $2000. That’s a couple thousand bucks I don’t have to hand it over to the IRS. Instead, I stash it under my future self’s mattress. She’s breathing a bit easier now.
She even sends me a thank-you note.
With year-end paperwork all around, I slice open the statements for my personal IRA and my employer’s retirement plan. Another tilting moment finds me re-reading the numbers printed three and then four times. Added together, these accounts hold a measure of security that I hadn’t allowed myself to imagine. Not this year, not ever. My future self grins as I blink and turn it over in my hands.
This number — my number — is one that would make your average 41-year-old professional cringe, especially one with looming college costs and no spouse to share the pain. It’s a modest number at best. Hell, it’s not even a fixed number. 2014 was a good year for the stock market, and we all remember 2007 all too well. I won’t be kicking back anytime soon.
That said, now this:
Wow.
This lovely, round, many-figured number, planted right at the spot I’d tilled with all my anxiety? It is a marvel. If I retire today, I might be able to live about three years on that little plot. But I don’t have to retire today. The number and I, we have time to expand, to compound.
This number didn’t just fall from the sky. It is a nourished by habits. It is miles of walking instead of driving, months of Friday nights at home making pizza with my son, yards of outdated fashion hanging in my closet. This number is planted in rich soil. It drinks intention. I get to keep feeding it with thrift and care, each watering a small gift to the someday me.
She is watching. She welcomes what grows here.
She is what grows here.
Even if he nudges at every edge,
carrying his dinner to the counter to eat
alone, back turned,
before coming over to wreck the card game you’ve set up
then filling up a squirt gun you didn’t even know he owned
just so he can get you in the face
and grinning
as he says he’d like to kill you
for real
so he could get all your money
to buy himself an Xbox
Even it’s 9:54 pm and the bed contains
sketch paper, markers, silly putty, pokemon cards, library books,
and a kid not anywhere close to sleep
Even if you know the student
you dismissed from university today
and the other one with the conduct hearing tomorrow
are having much worse nights than you
Even if the dog keeps knocking her bone
under the couch and digging
at a bamboo floor
that might be the sole selling point
of this, the lone asset in an estate
from which he’d be lucky
to wring an Xbox
Even if you know the bone
is just a surrogate for the play
or walk she really needs
and your back creaks and your stomach churns
and you haven’t finished the letter to your grandmother
you started last week or called
to thank your girlfriend,
lover, or any of the circle
of angels who’ve kept you
off the cliff
for a decade
or two
Even if you don’t have one ounce
of energy left
You draw
a drop
from somewhere
Even if
thin air
and write
This:
Tonight, the sickle cuts a cool, slender tear
in the bruised night.
Later,
the boy in the back seat says
“I can see the full moon.”
This is the first time
in months
you know
what the sky holds.
The first time
you’ve remembered
to look.
“Isn’t it a crescent?” You ask.
His face fogs the glass.
“I can see the whole dark thing.”
You tell him the earth
casts shadows. “A little sun gets past,” you say.
It always does.
Even if we imagine ourselves so big.
Even if we forget to look up.
Staying connected to other humans is a necessity. This is especially so for a working single mom with a taste for the blues. Yet the rules of the Financial Fast forbid dining out and spending money on entertainment.
Catching up with folks for free is harder than it seems. After dispensing with restaurants, shows, coffee shops, bars, karaoke, ice rinks, shopping, and all the other cold-weather activities out there, what’s left? Three weeks of January without seeing loved ones = emotional suicide (I tell myself). When schedules are tight and the nights are long, grabbing a bite out seems like the only option (I tell myself).
Is it any wonder so many Americans are looking up from the bottom of the financial pit, wondering how the hell to climb out? It’s sometimes the case that a person’s money struggles come on the heels of a single seismic life event. Most folks, however, work their way there one small seemingly inconsequential decision at a time. It’s possible to rationalize any expense, no matter how big, no matter how frivolous. Wants morph into needs, and the same old habits keep playing out.
The point of this fast is to figure out ways to stick to the rules, not ways to sneak around them. For those of us living close to the bone, the tradeoff between money and time is as near even as you can get. Make your own bread from scratch, and you’ll save about as much money as you could earn with the time spent elsewhere. Take on a little extra work, and the money ends up paying for the additional gas and childcare. It all comes out in the wash. How can a person really tend to these necessities on limited means — both financial and otherwise?
These 21 days lean towards the Save Money/Spend Time side of the equation. This is why it’s important to consider a broader definition of “spending habits.” A few extra minutes making lunch for work is important, but where else might resourcefulness and creativity be useful? After all, we all have certain essential activities that keep us thrumming. It may be dancing or sports, learning or art, travel or food — whatever it is, chances are, doing it the familiar way is too expensive. The problem is that self-discipline smacks of self-denial. When limits become suffocating, either the old ways return or the person inside wilts.
There has to be a third way.
For our little family, I believe there is. Inside this labyrinthine universe of Us, maintaining relationships is as essential as exercise, work, and a good night’s sleep. That said, our schedules stretch us so thin, friends feel like another “thing to do,” which is exactly why we have to keep them in the front of our minds. Community feeds us. We have to feed it in turn.
This weekend, we let the Financial Fast force ingenuity and forethought. Instead of going out on Saturday night, we extended a dinner invitation to my folks and a few family friends. We spent the day cleaning and making our little condo fancy with the baubles on hand. The meal was bare bones — dull, in fact — but no one seemed to care. My mother contributed pie and appetizers, and another guest brought a salad. Bug was crazy proud to host. All day and evening, he pitched it. As guests arrived, he donned an apron and took drink orders. Our little group was a warm light in the dead of winter.
It was work and it was exhausting, but also, it was so very simple.
And we managed it all on the grocery budget.
If not for the fast, we probably would have just gone to a movie. Or I might have plopped Bug in front of a DVD while I focused on one of the countless unfinished projects from work. Instead, Bug and I worked together to welcome friends into our home. We planned a menu, decorated, baked and tidied, and shared time with the people we care about. Here we are the next morning with a beautifully organized space, feeling connected and happy.
Maybe the trick is to take the long view. We have to dare to imagine the composition — career, home, relationships, art, and overall well-being — we most want for ourselves and our families. The question then becomes: What can we cultivate here and now with what we have on hand?
For these weeks as in the year ahead, a Saturday night can be exercise in frugality, but it doesn’t have to just be that. It can also be an opportunity for creativity and celebration, and a chance to build towards a life both balanced and vibrant.
Beginning on Sunday, January 11, Michelle Singletary, a Washington Post columnist, charges her readers to commit to three weeks of scrupulous frugality.
The 2015 21-day Financial Fast is one simple Thing I Can.
The rules are easy (to list, if not to live): Spend only on essentials and do so in cash. In last weekend’s column, Singletary writes,
Here’s a list of what you can spend on during the fast: food (bought at the grocery store), medicine, essential personal hygiene products, items that may be required for your job, your regular household bills such as rent or a mortgage, car payments, utilities, gas and even your credit-card payments. This isn’t an all-inclusive list. The point is you continue to pay for the things you need and the bills you already have.
Here’s what you are not allowed to do during the fast: go to the movies, shop for clothes, buy lunch or coffee at work, pay for any restaurant or fast-food meals, spend on entertainment. The goal is to shut down all conspicuous consumption. You will temporarily stop spending on things you can do without.
I live pretty close to the bone as it is. It’s a breeze to walk away the metro parking fee, and schlepping a stack of provisions in Pyrex frees me up to run other errands on my lunch hour. Even so, I waste a few bucks a week on takeout meals, 7-11 coffee, and apps for my kid’s tablet. It seems like nothing when I’m just clicking an icon or dropping loose change on a counter. Of course, it doesn’t take advanced algebra to add up those nickels. From the back of the envelope here. . .
That’s upwards of $60 dropped on stuff Bug and I don’t need and isn’t good for us anyway. Maybe we’re not talking Monaco money, but it ain’t chump change. If we pack the snacks and go to the park, we’ve squirreled away $3000 a year. Compound the interest even at a modest 3% rate over the next decade, and we creep towards — get this — $40,000.
Can you imagine?
Switching to home-brewed coffee could cover a year of Bug’s tuition. It could increase the value of our home by paying for energy-efficient doors and windows. Or it could send me to a weekend writer’s conference while Bug attends a summer adventure camp.
Minor adjustments now contribute to smoother performance down the line. The Financial Fast doesn’t require going it alone. Singletary sends daily guidance and provides tools along the way. Committing to the fast is just step one. For me, step two is building an actual working budget.
Despite knowing better, I have failed to follow through on what should be a rudimentary household activity. I left my last comprehensive budget behind when I left New York and my marriage in 2010. My reasons are for avoiding the exercise are as coherent as they are bogus. As the daily tug-of-war between chocolate cake and running shoes proves, the drive to dodge wise choices is more powerful than anyone likes to admit. The truth is, I know better. Out of necessity, I built that first financial spreadsheet sometime in 2006. Living on $30,000 as a YMCA camp family with a new baby inspired rather creative approaches to austerity.
I learned then that making a budget and tracking spending can lift the fog of financial anxiety that hangs over anyone trying to support a family on limited means. The obfuscation of my actual circumstances, while presumably a defense mechanism against facing uncomfortable truths, exchanges short-term relief for long-term stress. This is about as poor a deal as most of my spending habits. I don’t need it anymore — the anxiety or the avoidance. As one Thing I Can do, this fast is a chance to shed unhelpful habits and claim a bright future for my family.
Interested? Go to the Washington Post’s Financial Fast site and take the plunge!
Here’s my kid in his Jack Sparrow
goodwill T-shirt, belly-down
in a spill of hand-me-down legos
pressing flat planes
into airplanes
singing
“I’m gonna pop some tags
Only got twenty dollars in my pocket.”
What what?
The contraption has train wheels
on the front end and truck tires
backing mismatched engines
but it takes wing
with guns blazing, enemy fighters
crashing in a fiery screech,
no match for the patchwork leviathan
my kid is smoking
like threads
like foes
like the beat he pulls
with a what what
nod
from the hole
in his pocket.
—
Apologies to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Thrift Shop.
“If we walk far enough,” says Dorothy, “we shall sometime come to someplace.”
-L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
I had not entertained the possibility of defeat. In the six months since making an offer on the one condo we could make our own, I had only allowed Yes and its ilk to join me on this convoluted voyage. At every twist in the yellow road, I simply closed my eyes for the half-second required to tap heels and picture home. Square shoulders, gather senses, and press on.
Until the letter arrived.
One slim envelope, and not a surprise, turned up in the mail yesterday. “Your application for credit has been denied.” No big deal. I pulled the plug on the quasi-approved loan after it became clear the short sale was going to eat into my finances for another month or three. Two banks on the seller’s end are duking it out over a piddly $3700 discrepancy in the assessed price of the home. Meanwhile, my lender is awaiting word from a county engineer indicating that recent repairs at the complex pass muster. The county engineer, whose name and number I scrounged up in my determination to gain some semblance of control over the situation, takes my call but to no avail. Her hands are tied as she awaits word from the property manager indicating the dispute over rehab costs is resolved. The property manager refuses to say spit because the complex is involved in legal proceedings.
To tip the whole endeavor into emerald absurdity, my bank started charging me $450 every two weeks to extend a loan with no fixed end date. I made the harrowing decision to let it all slide for a month and then reapply. The dream condo is still under contract with me, though, so I trust this is merely a waiting game.
Perhaps my trust has been a fool’s errand.
When I open the letter, an entirely different story tumbles out. My lender has denied my loan not because I failed to extend it but because of a laundry list of credit problems. In the nine months I have been working with this bank – my bank, the one I have used for insurance and checking accounts and credit cards for 15 years – not one of these issues has surfaced. Too many credit inquiries? Too much money in rotating accounts? Insufficient collateral? How is any of this possible, and why has no one mentioned it before?
A breeze from the open window lifts the pages from the bed where I have dropped them. I can’t bear to look at those terse, typed lines. The simple goal of buying a home blurs and retreats. Without this, there is, quite literally, nothing.
Nothing but here.
It’s not as if another place is out there waiting, one that’s just a little less expensive or a tiny bit further from my son. Not a single local condo even at the outer reaches of my price range has been listed in the past three months. The only affordable properties are an hour’s drive away. As the weeks of economic recovery tick by, the asking prices at the low end are ballooning beyond reach.
Let’s not get into a discussion of rental costs. I can actually afford (just barely) a mortgage and condo fees. Stick the extra few hundred per month on top that local landlords demand and I cannot even squeeze Bug and me into a one-bedroom, let alone a place where we can grow.
Mother’s day just passed. I had started to believe those friends that generously reached out to tell me I am a good mom. I can’t help biting back the response: So the f**k what? What does it matter? Sure, I love my kid and give him a decent-enough life. But what to make of this this very basic metric of providing? What to do with this failing grade? I cannot afford a home for my child.
As the breeze scatters pages around my room, every mistake I have ever made pushes up like a twister and tilts the world. That knotted string of poor decisions spills out behind me. At any point, I could have chosen differently, chosen more wisely. Chosen to fight harder for the marriage. Chosen to nourish my own career instead of Tee’s. Chosen to pursue an MBA or a teaching degree instead of my indistinct master’s in nothing remotely marketable. I could have decided to stick with the GIS which came so naturally instead of foregoing it for dance and revolution. I could have studied harder, maintained a professional network, written about something substantial, stopped hiding. Could have stopped pouring energy into worthless shit like gardens, bread, mountains, books, and friends. Cut short the conversations. Culled the flourishing heart.
Gotten to work.
Then, perhaps, I could have the capacity to reach this one simple goal. I might be able to provide for my son.
As it is, I have to live at the front end of this frayed string. I try to braid it into some sort of rope to haul Bug and me up and out of this spinning house and onto a patch of solid ground. It splits in my hands. It shears to nothing.
Paper and sisal. Me, suddenly trapped in a tiny bedroom not even my own. Stunned into paralysis. Now how to proceed? The choices I make today, are they similarly foolish? I can’t begin to understand how my credit is rated poor. Aside from a car I paid off in 2006, I have never held one penny of debt. I pay my cards in full each month. I have no college loans, no collections agencies after me. Somehow, I manage to maintain small but steadily growing balances in retirement, 529, and brokerage accounts. Ample funds to cover expenses both planned and otherwise are a click away every month. In fact, my checking now has more cash in it than I’ve ever seen in my life, squirreled away there to cover 20% down on a vanishing dream.
My credit is poor, quite simply, because I am.
A good-enough job for the Commonwealth of Virginia is barely sufficient for a single woman to survive. It falls short of thriving, and barely enters the ballpark of getting by when a kid is added to the equation.
Yet, I had I assumed my choices are the right ones for right now. The daily mile to and from the metro saves me $5. Taking breakfast and lunch saves me $10 or more. My hair looks like a factory-floor mop squeezed a few too many times through the rollers because I refuse to put money where the payoff isn’t evident. I hold onto a low-paying job with good benefits and flexible hours so that I can pick up my child at the end of the day and still have time for a conversation with him over dinner. We spend our weekends wandering the woods or roaming the neighborhood, eschewing outings that require a fee. All the small sacrifices, the little denials of indulgence, the hand-kneading of the pizza crust from sourdough starter and hand-making of Christmas gifts, because I believed that simplicity could lead Bug and me to the place we belong.
But what if I’ve been wrong?
What if it is cowardice or stupidity keeping me quiet in my room at night writing poetry? What if contra dancing and nighttime walks are just time – precious, would-be productive hours – tossed in the garbage? What if I have only been avoiding the hard work of launching a real career? A girl’s got to pay the bills. This isn’t a game anymore. I don’t get to make decisions based on what feels good or what compels that tenuous aspect called “spirit” (something, as it so happens, I don’t even believe exists) to roam those lush meadows of the imagination.
And now I wonder what it would take. Which missing part drives me to Oz to tap the source? I fear I lack in every regard. My loose, anemic heart has not loved self or son enough to get past my idle ways. My brain has languished in a vacuous, quasi-childhood of pleasure instead of erecting bridges with industry and precision. And my courage? Never has it been emptier than when I have tried to draw upon it as I lurch towards the lip of necessary change.
Without doggedly pursuing these attributes, why would I expect to find my way anywhere more substantial than Munchkinland? How could I have been so silly as to think I could tap my heels and carry us home?
The paperwork is not hard. Neither is combing through the matted threads of text filling 72 pages of contract. The paying is not hard, though willing the fingers to let go of the cash takes a little prompting. The saving is not hard. That is simply a daily commitment to a higher degree of deprivation, and in any event, not doing is always easier than becoming or achieving. The moving itself isn’t even hard. It’s just sort, pack, schlep, unpack, sort.
This is the secret that mountain climbers keep. Those who don’t hike marvel at the fortitude required to summit Pike’s Peak. Of course it takes strength, training, and determination. But it is not hard. In fact, it is the simplest thing in the world. Zen simple. You go forward. You go up. You put one foot down and then lift the other.
The steps are not the challenge.
The decisions? Now those are hard.
To scale that peak on that date, to re-organize commitments, to gear up and pack right and make time every day to train, these choices require a trickier sort of grit. Every assessment is complex. Someone always throws a monkey wrench in the plan. The weather forecast looks grim or an Achilles is torn or a hiking partner starts to hem and haw. It’s time to calculate risks and weigh options. To re-draw the map.
It’s the decisions that take grit.
This week, a co-worker mentioned that she and her husband are looking to buy a home for the first time. “We’re still shoe-shopping,” she said. “It’s kind of fun.” The beginning is just browsing. Try it on, imagine life in those four walls, stash the picture, let go. Then the just-looking begins to draw ever tightening circles around the realm of the possible. The window shopper returns to this place or that and walks the neighborhood. A call goes in to the agent, “Just to get a little more info.”
Now things get serious. The would-be buyer is suddenly You.
Cue the decisions.
How much can you afford? Between commute, schools, size, price, amenities, noise, layout, storage, neighbors, construction, and condition, what are your priorities? What is the relative value of feature, and what combinations are acceptable? Does dream trump reality or the other way around?
You see a place you really like but low ceilings or high taxes give you pause. Do you make the offer? Do you sign the dotted line? You take a few days to cogitate. Now it’s under contract with someone else. You missed your chance. You keep looking.
The pace picks up. The decisions get harder.
Are you really ready to buy? What’s the right thing for now and for the maybe-future? You see another place. Walking through the door makes you swoon. It’s more money for less space in the right place, or less money for more space in the wrong place. The agent takes your offer and your check for earnest money. Waiting, still looking elsewhere. Counter offer. Higher, no contingencies, three days to decide.
Hold or fold?
If you’re in, brace yourself. The inspection, negotiations, loan application, and HOA documents fly at you like a freak hailstorm, bam bam bam. Every time you turn around, a decision blindsides you. People you’ve never met call you up and demand your life savings. The clock won’t wait and the storm won’t relent. In a process like this in a market like this, people who need quiet time to think are out of luck. Adapt or die.
Lisa Sturtevant stopped me in the hall at work the other day. Chatting about my condo search, she said, “This area is weird. Nowhere else in the country is experiencing a feeding frenzy like this.” The inventory at the more affordable end is at a record low while demand is at a record high. This sends prices to the top of Mt. McKinley and shrinks time frames to barely a blink. As a part of the Center for Regional Analysis, she knows her stuff. A few of Lisa’s articles on the DC area housing market are here and here.
Home buying in the greater Washington region means making momentous decisions very quickly with little information against cutthroat competition. Forget climbing Mt. Shasta. This is landing behind the wheel of an F1 McLaren on the final lap of the Grand Prix the day after you’ve gotten your license.
All those mountains don’t prepare you for this kind of hard. It’s everything at stake and right now. Think fast and keep those reflexes honed to a fine point.
Terrifying? Absolutely. Too much? Probably.
But, oh, my. The rush!
Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction.
– Will Rogers
After two hours on the phone with a loan officer, I’m in. Approval! At long last, the gods have given the nod which has always eluded me. It was not just sleight of hand and self-deception. Those blackened pennies dropped into the jar have turned into something tangible after all. The cash is tight but it is sufficient. For the purposes of this one stunning undertaking, we have enough.
How princely of them, yes? To allow me to pay them more money in interest alone than I’ve ever seen in my life? Still, a loan of this sort is no small favor.
Thirty days. That’s it. With fingers crossed and a calendar packed tighter than an orange line train at rush hour, we’ve scheduled the closing for April 3. In the meantime, everything and more clamor for attention. The inspection is scheduled for Thursday when the region is on track to be trapped under 10 inches of snow. The appraisal follows on its heels and then the condo association hauls out HOA documents. That tome will land in my hands right when I’m boarding a plane for Florida for a three day student affairs conference. I’ll have exactly 72 hours to comb through meeting minutes, addenda, and financial statements before I’m locked in for good.
Did I mention that I am also a single mom with a job, a dog, and a rising tide of laundry in the hallway? And that I scared out of my mind? This is a staggering chunk of change to buy a home that looks nothing like I ever imagined settling me into a life that I never planned.
Time expands to fill the need, I hear. And the press of those needs keeps the terror at bay. The roadside rest area where Bug and I stopped to catch our breath was only just that. We cleared our heads. We refilled the tank. We established a manageable routine. It’s been comfortable. Orderly. Safe.
Idling in neutral is certainly exactly those things. Unsustainable too. Not to mention dull as dirt.
So now, action. And all the dangers of putting this beast into gear and edging our way back onto the open road.
Off we go!
Shannon E. Williams 