Always hope

Even when things are at their darkest, we still always have hope.  That's what this beautiful sky reminded me of.  After a torrential downpour that left mini lakes and mud bogs and general misery to deal with, out comes the sky with these stunning shards of hope keeping me afloat!!!

Um…..hi?

She said sheepishly.  My last post was over 2 years ago.  (That stuck in my throat a little.)  But what I’m about to tell you is probably going to stick a lot more.  Especially since this revelation has been 2+ years in coming…

And it’s uniquely difficult since in my last post I was espousing the benefits of being open and telling the world your problems.  Little did I know that the problems could get so bad I would crawl into a hole and not come out for years.  I just couldn’t bear the thought of anyone knowing what was going on.  I was ashamed.

Well, remember how our lives were in upheaval and we were moving?  We ran out of money and lost our home, but had a new option, albeit a less than optimal one…. Things didn’t quite work out that way.

Our gift horse turned out to be more of a profit driven ass (did I say ass?  I meant mule.)  The miserable situation that we had been offered came with an exorbitantly high price tag.  Would you like some skin along with the blood you are trying to squeeze from the rock??? Homeless and destitute are not words that some people understand.  But again, luckily for us, some people do.  My dear husband talked to his family.  He hadn’t wanted to do that, because he was ashamed too, but our only other option was moving into the national forest.  There was a family meeting and we were allowed to move our travel trailers onto the family plot.  And all our junk and the chickens, too.  I think we are technically gypsies now, since we have been living out of the trailers for 2 and a half years.  It has been a humbling (and pretty miserable) experience.  I try everyday to be thankful for what we have, and grateful for the blessings we do have.  Things could be worse.  So there is our dirty little secret and the reason I haven’t felt like talking for a whole 2 years.

(You may ask, “What the heck?  Don’t you people work for a living?  What’s wrong with you?”)  1) Don’t judge, Judgey McJudgey Face, lest ye be judged.  2) Yes, we do.  But since I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia several years ago, my income has steadily gone downhill because of the jobs I am able to take (I make maybe a third of what I used to, on a good year) and Woody’s business took a nosedive in 2008 from the “Great Recession” and it never recovered before being laid to rest in 2011.  And our bills just didn’t seem to understand that our income took a $50K a year hit.  We could have liquidated all our assets and been solvent.  And be living comfortably in an apartment just like the rest of the world.  But our dreams wouldn’t die.  We want to escape the rat race, and the only way to do that was to hold onto what we have, not sell it!  We work, pay our property payments and our bills, just like everyone.  Only whereas we once could afford rent in town and to buy our property, we can only afford one of those.  We chose the property.  And it is remote enough that at this point we can’t live there and still make enough money to pay the other bills off. [A town of 90 doesn’t have lots of openings in the job market.]  So yes, we work, and work hard, but as of now we are still trying to save our dreams from the chopping block. 
Wow, that’s a huge load off my chest.  Now that I’ve yelled it from the rooftops, maybe I can go ahead and move on with life.  We’ve continued homesteading as much as we can in the trailers, and still have our little flock of 14 chickens.  As soon as we save up enough for a well for the property, we might just get moved up there!  Wish us luck and stay tuned for more updates.