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I suppose it’s fitting that I would return to MHA on what proves, yet again, to be a snowy day in Denver.

It’s also anniversary time, two years and change since we started this blog. I read what I wrote a year ago, and it brought tears to my eyes. It’s sort of like reading a teenage diary entry written after being dumped three days before the prom (yes, that happened to me): You remember the pain, but that pain is no longer yours.
The money situation hasn’t improved appreciably, although my husband has a far better job now and our long-term prospects look much better. We still live in a land of seemingly endless winter, with spring a long way away, and I’m looking at another summer without my pond and my daylilies. But I have learned, as many do, that the only way to make it through that feeling of groundlessness is to look up. That transition was hard, of going from a life of convenience to a life with little, but I am stronger now. I am no longer traumatized or saddened by having to do without. There is something kind of restorative and (maybe death-defyingly) invigorating about knowing that, if we’re going to afford having constant bread for sandwiches, I’m just going to have to make it. Or that, rather than spending $15 a week on cereal, I can make it for a fraction of the cost. Or that, rather than throw out socks and buy less holey ones, I’m just going to have to learn to darn. People lived like this for years and years and years, and I can, too.
I’ve become an expert of sorts at this sort of basic frugality (or at least a cheerful enough proponent, I suppose), so much so that I have been invited to teach a workshop on it. I’m terrified – teaching is so completely out of my comfort zone – but at the same time, I’m kind of excited about it. This (along with the singing, which has continued) constitutes a new chapter of my life, and one that wouldn’t have come if we hadn’t left North Carolina and experienced some rather terrifying lean times.

We were back in North Carolina at the beginning of the month, and I was fine until I went to see an old friend on the last night we were there. She lives in North Raleigh, in the same house in the same nice, suburban neighborhood with the pool club and tennis courts, and my favorite house in the neighborhood was for sale. I drove past slowly, wondering, “Could we …?” before snapping to and remembering that, of course, we could not. And I felt sad that I could not live near her, and that our kids could not still play together and that we could not trick-or-treat together anymore; and at the same time I looked at this house, which looked too big, and this well-manicured neighborhood, and I thought, “I wanted THIS?” It is so far removed from the dreams I have now. It seemed too extravagant, too wasteful. I hadn’t realized how much I had changed, how much my circumstances had changed me, until I looked at the house I had always wanted and realized that I no longer wanted it.