In 2009, my year of shadow and light began. Leading up to that year, however, were the first two years of married life with my husband, laying the foundation for the challenges we would face beginning in 2009. In this week’s video, we talk about the house we purchased and began making into a home for our much-anticipated children, finally entering 2009, the year that changed my life completely.

 

You can watch my YouTube video (link below) or read chapter 4 below.

 

4. A New Home and New Trials

We have the power to be content in all things, because it can always be worse.

—John R. Hodel, Lessons from the Back Roads

 

Mike began working in a town roughly halfway between our new apartment and our old one. We started planning how to buy a house. This was just at what we perceived as the beginning of the financial crisis that started in very early 2008. We learned that we would be able to get a fantastic fixed rate from the credit union of the company where I worked, so we really started looking in earnest for a house. We looked for anything between where Mike worked and where I worked—preferably halfway, affordable, with acreage or at least a large yard, with at least three bedrooms so we could start our family, and preferably in the country.

We found a house that was good for us. It wasn’t halfway between our workplaces (it was only seven miles from Mike’s job), but it met everything else on our criteria list. We closed on and took possession of the house in April 2008.

We were thrilled. We had a 9-room house with attached two-car garage and a basement. We had 3.4 acres. We lived in the country—a little closer to the very busy highway than we would have liked, but we could deal. We had a paved driveway. We had room for a vegetable garden. We had abundant room to start planting trees and bushes and flowers. We immediately bought a few seeds and plants and started our garden.

Right after we closed on the house, we got word that my job function (editing) would be done away with at my company, because it was something that we did “too well” and it “wasn’t necessary” for the company to compete in its main business function. There had been whispers about the dead-end features of our job function. There had even been an official meeting outlining new strategies for us to do our jobs “a little less well.” This meeting told us there was going to be a process for selecting who was going to stay…only a handful of jobs were going to remain, and they weren’t going to be much like what we were currently doing—at all, by the sound of it.

I started looking for another job and found one quickly: a contract job with a government agency. Sure, I would be giving up a full-time job for a contract job, but the full-time job was going to be going away in a few weeks or months, and the contract job was going to pay me as much in 6 months as I made in 10 or 11 at my current job. It seemed like a bit of a gamble, but not much.

Just after I accepted the new job, we were at our house when a tremendous thunderstorm moved through, bringing 80- or 90-mile-an-hour straightline winds that caused one of our trees to split apart. Limbs fell onto the house, doing some damage to the roof, gutters, and soffit.

I spent June 14 and 15 with my husband and parents, moving the last few things out of our apartment and into our house. On June 16, I started my new job.

On my way home from work that afternoon, my husband called me on my cell phone. I answered cheerfully but heard my husband tell me gravely that we had been robbed. Someone had broken into our home and had stolen all of my jewelry (in a chest), a basket full of items that had been sitting next to the jewelry chest, and my husband’s swords and bows. We had just moved all of those things in the day before.

A few days later, the man who had robbed us was caught, and we learned that he had a history of theft and of violence. We were incredibly grateful that neither one of us had been home at the time. We laughed, too, because in all the time we had lived in apartments, near college students, and sometimes with all sorts of shady characters running about, we’d never had any issues with people other than a few noisy parties, and as soon as we moved to the country, we got robbed. We spent the next few weeks getting the doors replaced, getting an alarm system installed, and dealing with our homeowners insurance because of the storm damage and the robbery.

Less than a month after I started my new job, Mike was told he was going to lose his contract job. We were very worried. Within the week, however, his boss told him he’d be keeping his job after all. We thrived over the next few months. Mike’s mom, stepdad, sister, and sister’s boyfriend flew in from Oregon to spend Thanksgiving with us and to help us decorate for Christmas, and my parents drove up on Christmas Day to spend a few days with us before the new year. We were happy, if cold.

Our furnace was overworked and had not been well maintained, so it went out on us a time or two. It just couldn’t keep up with the demands of the drafty house and very cold, very windy weather. In January and February, there were days we wore three or four layers of clothes and our furnace never shut off and we were still freezing. We made plans to have a geothermal heat pump installed. It was going to be expensive, but compared to all the money we’d already spent on propane and the cost to repair or replace our broken-down furnace, we knew it was our best option.

In January or February of 2009, we again learned that Mike was going to be losing his job, but this time, there was nothing his boss could do about it. Mike had until the last day in February.

Despite Mike losing his contract job, early in 2009, it

seemed like it was going to be a good year for us. Our geothermal heat pump was installed in March, and it was fantastic.

 

We needed a windbreak for the winter, a sound barrier for the highway, and fruit-bearing trees and bushes to provide food for ourselves and our long-awaited children. At the very beginning of April, we started an orchard and berry patch, planted several trees as windbreaks around the property, and had a very nice garden.

Because Mike wasn’t working outside the home, he dedicated almost all his time to keeping the house and the garden—especially the garden. He read every book we had about planting. He experimented, learned about our weather patterns and our soil type and the seeds that would do best for our soil. This was our livelihood, and he took to it like a fish to water.

Because we were living on only my income and knew that my contract may not get renewed in May, we really focused on eating cheaply and on preserving as much of our food as we could. I also read a couple of books about eating for better fertility, and we changed our eating habits a bit. I started going to the chiropractor because I was having some back pain and because I had read that proper spinal alignment could really help with fertility. Mike and I started exercising together regularly and eating far fewer processed foods, more whole grains and less animal protein, less trans fat and animal fat, and more fats from plant sources. We used the crockpot about every 2 or 3 days to cook beans and brown rice and barley and bulgur wheat and vegetables. We bought canning supplies. We prepared.

Although we still hadn’t paid off all my education and credit card debt, we were finally living the life we wanted—we “owned” a home in the country, had some land, had a fairly successful garden, had plans for a better garden, and had planted an orchard. Now we just needed to have a baby. We’d been trying for several years—not seriously hard, just letting nature take its course, but nature was taking its dear, sweet time.

Still, we were happy, and we loved each other.

***

Thank you for allowing me to share this part of my journey with you. Please let me know what you think so far and if you want to hear/read more of my story.

 

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