Less OK

According to "How to Train Your Dragon", if you fall off of a dragon, you will be OK, but if the dragon then proceeds to step on you, you will be 'less OK'.  That's where I am now.  Less OK.

We were admonished to keep a three month supply of money in reserve for emergencies; we did.  We were taught to not have any debt; we don't.  But even with all of those good financial practices in place, our financial everything still sits out in the cold, open air right now, with ravenous wolves eyeing it on every side.  And there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.  Nothing.  There's always been something and now there's nothing.  Wait and watch and possibly.. wretch.

When Mark was in Desert Storm, it was the longest winter of my life.  There was nothing I could do about that situation either, but hope the phone in our basement apartment would ring at 3 am so that I could know that he was still alive.  We paid the phone company $1 a minute to talk to each other back then.  We'd talk until it was no longer possible to ignore the other soldiers in line, who were waiting to call their girls too and burn through their dollars as well.  AT&T definitely made the biggest killing of that war; but still to this day there has been no thrill in my life to match that of going from a state of sound asleep to hearing the phone ring in the other room to being in a full throttle sprint, as I tore out of bed and through our dark living room, grabbing the receiver before the sheets even had time to drop back down onto the mattress.

Eventually those frozen, overcast days of '91 started to melt into clear blue skies and the sound of melting snow trickling down rain spouts brought a new energy as talks of a cease fire became real.  To this day, the sound of melting snow trickling down a rain spout makes me want to skip like a seven year old. But for now, it looks like I've got another long winter ahead of me.  Again...there is nothing I can do about it and interestingly enough... I'm living in a basement.

   P.S. What do you do when your husband comes home from a war? I managed to set aside $400 dollars while he was gone so that we could do something special when he returned. We ended up buying him new clothes and going on a road trip to San Francisco with the rest.