Stomach flu.
Exploding toilet.
Long flight off a short staircase.
The law of threeness had been fulfilled. But then -
Burned my arm in the oven pretty badly.
Childcare provider resigned.
New childcare expenses wiped out the already-tight grocery budget. For one year, until Kindergarten, things are going to be very character-building around here.
The superstitious wind-chapped fishwife that lives in my ancestral brain is squinting at these things and warning, These are the first two sets of three. Plant potatoes and salt the haddock, there is more coming. The older and more superstitious peat-chopping asshole adds, You're paying penance for being a wicked wanton woman and coming home pregnant to resign yourself to a life of marriage you should have been grateful for in the first place. The even more ancient blue-tattooed Celtic seafarer spits, None of this matters at all, and in any case it's nothing a minor blood sacrifice wouldn't solve, you weenie.
So I bandaged the burn, spent our last grocery money on meat, dried goods, and preserves as if battening down for a long winter, and sketched out plans for this year's vegetable garden. A fleet of seedlings is sprouting along the windowsills. I've got every library book on sustainability at the ready. The house is safe, the children are cared for, we have health insurance and secure jobs, the chickens are... not actually producing eggs right now, but alive and happy at least. The lychee tree is absolutely covered in budding fruit, the bananas are coming in, and there will never be a hard frost or a bitter night.
It's fine. It's fiiiiiine. It's good, even. It is healthy to tighten your belt and scrape things together and bake your own bread. Even tighter than you already were. Hoik that belt until you scream. You are so wholesome! People buy tiny houses and gypsy caravans just to dig deeper, when all they really need is to be flat broke. WE WIN, HIPSTERS.
No comments:
Post a Comment