Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade... nice, if it works that way. There are times that what life hands you isn't lemons, but destruction of almost the entire orchard. We never did get moved to the 20 acres we thought we were going to, which meant closing down an egg business that was doing a little better than breaking even in only 6 months. I thought that was doing pretty good. I lost my job two years ago. The place where we lived for 8 1/2 years closed 17 months ago. I'd been breeding, butchering, and eating meat rabbits in a rural mobile home park. I had up to 60 at the peak of my operation. I started with whatever meat type rabbits I could get. I'd managed to buy a purebred Champagne d'Argent buck, which is a heritage breed, and intended to buy more Champagne d'Argents when I could manage to. I thought it was fun that most of his pedigree is in French. When we were notified of the mobile home park closure, I stopped breeding and started getting rid of rabbits. I had a few Jersey Wooly rabbits (miniature Angoras) that I kept for fiber, just for my own fun. Those two closures cost me 60 animals. Roughly 100 people had to find someplace else to live. Mobile homes are gone, trees are gone, they brought in a Cat with a ripper blade... it's now bare ground, awaiting development. The truss plant where my husband had worked closed during the housing crisis. He became so depressed that he was trying to drink himself to death. He was hospitalized twice in about six months for bleeding ulcers. We separated 17 months ago. He went to live at Union Gospel Mission (UGM) in Spokane, WA, and entered the recovery program there. We thought I'd find a job and get back to being able to be mostly self-sufficient... things haven't worked out that way. I've been homeless for 16 months. The church group I'd hoped to be able to rely on for moral support kind of vanished. My van was stolen, leaving me to rely on a bad joke of a bus system and walking everywhere the bus doesn't go. When I needed to rely on the bus to get to work, it took 3-4 hours and 3-5 miles of walking every day to get to a job that was 10 miles from home. I thought that was bad enough, but I fainted in April, broke my right ankle, and it quite apparently hasn't healed correctly. I've been in two different homeless shelters in the last 8 months. Couch surfing's a better option. Not even Vocational Rehabilitation will work with me until the ankle heals, because I can't stand for more than a few minutes. The constant struggles get to me sometimes. OK, that's the bad news. I think there's been enough of that to last for a long while. Now for the good news: I've been involved with a community group called Circles, facilitated by the Community Action Partnership here, for about 4 years. It's not a Christian program, although there are a lot of Christians involved. I was able to rely on that group for moral support, to find resources in the community that I might not have been aware of otherwise. One of the functions of Circles is accountability. There were times that my 'to do' list seemed long enough that people were concerned that I was taking on too much with my limited resources and would become depressed, so I sometimes scaled back my want/wish lists. A lot of my goals were very long range, but they're now coming to fruition. My husband will graduate from Union Gospel Mission's residential recovery program on the 30th. The biggest factor in the depression was how Steve grew up. To say that Steve's childhood was chaotic doesn't begin to describe it. He spent years in foster care. When a foster kid is 18, he or she is dumped, the system is done with them. Part of what UGM did was help my husband be diagnosed with clinical depression. Turns out he's had that underlying problem for most of his life, and it was fueling the alcoholism. He will probably need to take antidepressants for the rest of his life, and watch and work carefully so that he doesn't allow himself to become isolated again. But now that we know what to look for, we can see how to work on that. UGM's program includes an after-care phase. Unlike foster care, people aren't just dumped. We've started marriage counseling, and will continue that. We've been talking with Steve's mentor. Steve's been interested in cooking, especially baking, for most of his life, but never took the risk to work in that field. Instead, he'd worked a series of survival jobs. There needs to be more to life than just paychecks and struggling to keep the bills paid. Part of UGM's aims is to equip people to thrive, not just thrive. Steve now has a part-time job in a bakery. Money will still be tight, but we've had a lot of experience with that. We've been accepted to a program that helps homeless veterans with vouchers for subsidized housing. We've have an application in process for a one bedroom apartment. Between two agencies and the corporation that owns the apartment complex, we've been told "We'll make this happen." We'd hoped to be able to have me move into an apartment a couple weeks ago, but that didn't happen. The hardest part is waiting and waiting for all the agencies, etc., to put the pieces together.