When I was putting up little teasers about the post I’d written for Hilltown Families yesterday, as part of My Mash Notes to Paradise series, I said of this one—about the lack of office buildings around my little town—that all the carpenters have masters degrees. It’s something we have said many, many times with our dear friend (and carpenter, also Remy’s godfather) Ted, with the MFA in sculpture. Sienna, who is by another name Hilltown Families, wrote me back that her daughter isn’t sure her parents work, but rather stay home and type on their computers all day.
Then, I had dinner with my pal, Tara, who owns one of the businesses around here I much admire, Jackson and Connor and she was telling me the story of how she decided to open her store. Short version: she knew, from time in retail, there was an audience for what she wanted to sell and she knew, having spent time in the business in New York, enough about the merchandise and the process of buying and selling, and there weren’t any great jobs around. So she created one in her twenties. You can say, “Wow.” I did.
(Ezekiel’s jeans are from Jackson and Connor)
Sharing these observations about a place without many elevators—and as one friend pointed out after reading—no escalators can sound cheeky or a tad bit flip. And certainly the warm, admiring of place answer can laud a spot where you run into your dentist and your farmer at the Y. The other truth is that with the economy in such a dark place, we aren’t laughing, not even the creative people making lemonade out of the lemons’ economy and certainly some of the prevailing humor these days is dark.
I stumbled upon a surprising answer to how much closer these realities are to being acknowledged (and let’s hope, addressed) yesterday when I read an article from Forbes about the work the National Network of Abortion Funds does. NNAF works to make sure women have funds for abortions, yes. Perhaps equally, the organization works to shine the light on what poverty means. Here’s the opening line to the story: “After she sold her wedding ring to buy groceries, she called the National Network of Abortion Funds and slept for the first time in weeks.”
Yesterday, too, a graphic was zipping around the interwebs about how many more hours of work are required—median averages here—for pay for rent in the 2000’s as compared to 1950. Short answer: it’s a bleep of a lot harder, now. One friend tweeted the chart made her feel better, in a way, as if she and her husband weren’t so personally messing up.
Improvisation is one thing. The rest… is another.
