With, without

Three hundred sixty-five days ago, I made my first post here.
I wrote that post from my house, a rambling house with a rambling yard that turned bright green in April, where I fed the robins and nuthatches and little gray squirrels tried to hoover up what was left. I had a garden, and a patio, and a pond, and a swing in the front yard just shy of the split-rail fence. We had a school that was more like a home, with friends and teachers we loved. I had a life as a county leader. We had a wide net of support -- family, longtime friends all around us. And we had money. Not a lot, sometimes not enough, but we could scrape something together.

What a difference a year makes. We have the mountains at our back step, but little else. Today my father turns sixty; and more than a thousand miles away, my family celebrates without me. We have a tiny house that costs entirely too much, with a little yard that never gets very green in this drought-ridden part of the country. We have no birds, but the squirrels are the size of small cats. We have a Dumpster. We have a school full of privileged children who are far too grown up for their own good and parents who are far too concerned with being hip to see the disservices they sometimes do their children. The organization that I led in North Carolina has grown and thrived; and I, like a proud mama, have had to stand back, let other people take over, and marvel at what it's become without me.
And money. The money that had been in our marvelous house evaporated. My checking account is embarrassingly overdrawn. We are behind on rent. I couldn't afford a present for my father's birthday. I'm sure my children will cry mutiny if they have to eat peanut butter sandwiches for dinner ever again. This has been the most miserable winter in memory.

So, if I must sit back and assess whether life is better now than it was a year ago (and frankly, I try not to), the answer is no. No. And no again. But there is one thing that has saved my life this year in this frosty place, and I find more and more that I cling to it as a rock climber to a ledge.
I have been cultivating a talent I always had for singing. I never thought it would get me anywhere, and yet it looks like maybe it will. Maybe I can get it to translate into cash. I've already gotten it to translate into something I confess I haven't felt for several years: joy. So, if you're in Denver and you hear a woman loonily singing trying to forget her troubles, maybe even crying at the same time but trying her damndest to smile, that probably would be me.