By Anne Williston
~ words meant for reality ~

My husband asked, “Why do these things always happen to us?”  We live between enough and not enough.  We depend on plumbers to call and honor warranties without hesitation.  We wait, in our ignorance of basic home maintenance, shivering through cold showers when our hot water heater quits working.  At the mercy of our own choices, some foolish, others misguided, some crafted out of the naïve assumption that love always finds a way, we fight bitterness as we splash cold water on our faces each morning. 

I ponder the inequities of our lives.  My students face the same or worse than we do.  Many of them come from families that rent, so are free from the cost of ownership we face. Class discussions reveal they have intimate knowledge of the dangers of using credit.  I rejoice that they may avoid the mistakes that now plague my own life.  I should have known better, but we financed with an A.R.M., using our equity to pay down debt.  We need to refinance again, but our credit is bad due to cut hours for my husband and our own financial errors.  We can’t refinance.  We’re stuck.

Our hot water heater is broken.  We’re miserable, tempers flare, as we face our inability to fix what’s broken by ourselves.

We’ve ignored basic financial sense.  Money sluices through our fingers, feasts of roasted pork followed by thin soup.  We heat hot water on the stove to wash the dishes.  Filling the basin once more, we mix hot with cold, step into the tub and raise our arms, shivering in anticipation of the hot downpour, water rivulets on the scalp and skin, cleansing fear from our skin.  Thus we remain, not giving way or giving in.