Has money ever been tight at your house? It has been, IS as ours right now. Or is it? I have wished for more money many times in my life. "If I had more money I would completely decorate my house, put my kids in more extra-curriculars, cook organic meals, maintain vehicles according to manufacturer's recommendations, dress with more style, take memorable family vacations, have more consistent date nights with my husband, never let my highlighted hair show the roots growing out, complete the landscape in my yard, lets see...what else, I know there's more. Oh, I know, have more kids, keep my house cleaner because I would have time since I wouldn't have to work, be more organized since I could afford more organizing units in my house, print anything I wanted in full color, stay up to date on scrapbooks because I could print off all of my digital albums, always have a house full of music since I could afford to buy what I wanted from i tunes, be more well read from all the books downloaded to my Kindle. Okay, maybe I should stop there. Perhaps I should have stopped earlier, now I feel like I'm murmuring.
The summer I left before college my parents took us on a family vacation to San Diego. This wasn't the first time. PAUSE:
Tribute to my dad. My dad is a GIS Specialist and whenever he can, he tries to attend the annual GIS conference held in San Diego every July. Dad would take the allotted money his job budgeted in for him to fly, eat, and lodge in a nice hotel, and stretched it as far as he could to take his family along. This meant driving for two days straight with three whiny kids in cars that would overheat in the California desert where he would walk to the nearest aquifer to scoop water to dump in the engine. It meant dealing with all kinds of disruptions to personal peace and enjoyment coming from the back seat such as fighting, puking, complaining, nagging for station changes, and loud and obnoxious games. All to offer us a dream come true of warm beaches, DisneyLand, Sea World, San Diego Zoo, and memories that will last a life time.
RESUME: The summer of 1999 (I had just graduated high school) my brothers and I got a new experience with our family San Diego trip. My dad walked us across the boarder into Tijuana, Mexico. This was my first experience with poverty of this extremity. The smell, putrid. The filth, everywhere. The pieces of tin leaned together to make houses. Women and babies slunched against buildings and roadsides. I woke up. Never in my life had I been conscientiously thankful for a bed and clean sheets, but I now was. I'd never been hungry because food is just plain not available to me. I'd never gotten sick from drinking the water that comes from my sink....I HAD SINKS! A new realization for me: everybody doesn't have indoor plumbing?
I haven't been to another place like that in my life since, but I have read about hunger and poverty. I've seen it in the media and I know first hand that it exists. So maybe it's time for me to re-evaluate what I would do if I had more money. And even if we never do win the lottery, I believe its the intention of my heart that matters. So tonight I acknowledge that I live in great prosperity. I have a bed, a home, food, computers with internet, cars, carpet, plumbing, windows that easily open and close, PAUSE:
Before we built our house we lived in a little 30 year old single wide mobile home. Every summer, we would have to take out all the winter windows and exchange them for screens so we could open windows in the summer. It was a huge pain. Our little poopy green trailer also had constant mice problems, no dryer heat vent outlet so the entire house would steam up when we ran the dryer (very frustrating in the hot summer), absolutely not storage space, no dishwasher, no oven (baked EVERYTHING in a counter top roaster including Savannah's first birthday cake, takes twice as long, everyone came for the celebration, cake still not done baking. Hi.). It all was but a moment and makes me much more thankful for my home now.
RESUME: means to add income to our household from home, medicines, grass, trees, garbage service. This is a list that SHOULD go on and on. So let me keep going, a deep freezer, a kitchen table, heat, more shoes than I can count in my head, 4 or 5 warm winter coats, cell phone, kindle, i pods, first aide products, clean water, tvs, wii, lots of food on storage shelves, full refrigerator, piano, concrete around house, garden shed, and many more things, but it is 11:30 pm and my eyes are beginning to droop, so I need to get to bed.
I didn't even mention the things I'm grateful for that truly have meaning like my family, religion, free country. But the next time I think about "being tight," I will also think that some people in the world live with so much less and are happy.
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