Lauri Shillings

My recent post on freedom vs. equality made me stop and think about my personal situation at home, and how circumstances often change. Sometimes time treats us kindly, other times she is a very fickle bitch indeed.

When my husband and I first met nearly 20 years ago, he was financially bankrupt. He was literally living from check to check and had more interest in drinking the majority of his paycheck than spending it on housing or utilities. At that time, I had most certainly been irresponsible with my money, but I was in marginally better financial shape than he. His divorce was final, his union job had fired him and the arbitration over the firing was going to take at least a year. He decided to move out east to Maryland. Needless to say, love blinded me to many things. I followed him.

I bankrolled the U-Haul trailer that carried all of his belongings behind his aging relic of a Cadillac. My Pontiac station wagon carried the rest with my belongings. Everything else was stored in the barn at my parent’s house. We moved across country with little more than our last paycheck in hand, the clothes on our back and what we considered our worldly belongings.

I can remember what seemed to me, a never-ending, exhausting drive over the mountains. I can clearly recall the only good thing about the whole thing was the oh-so-magical smell of honeysuckle growing in abundance on every hillside as we pulled into an average looking town. He had friends who lived in Hagerstown, Maryland. The Woodards had moved there in the previous year or so for their work. He had been out to visit them several times before I met him. We were fortunate enough to stay with them for those first few weeks.

After much trial and effort, Jim found us a small walk up apartment on the second floor of a grand old Victorian. It had been converted into four apartments. The landlady had looked at Jim’s long hair rather skeptically, decided he was at least well groomed and spoke English and that was good enough. She cautioned us that our dog (a very young Rottweiler) would have to be in a crate at all times when we were not home, walk through inspections would be regular and no drug use was tolerated. Now all we needed was employment to keep up the rent.

That home was perched on the top of a tremendous hill. You had to drive up a one way street to park in front of it, and drive back down the street to get anywhere from it. The backyard was pitched down to a four-lane highway that separated its grassy expanse from the nature park across the pavement. We were more than welcome to use the pay-your-way laundry facilities in the basement. We used quarters that we got from the change machine at the car wash once a week and carried our basket down those ever steepening steps to wash and dry before the rest of the house came to stare at your things. It was a perpetual race to see who could get there first on a Sunday morning. There was only one washer and dryer.

Jim found employment in a small town to the north as a vacuum repairman. This was technically pretty good money for the area at $10.00 per hour. A 3-day stint at a counter top laminate factory cured him of cheap cash under the table labor at $5.00 per hour when we first arrived, but it kept us in our apartment that first month. This is when time seemed to catch up to us again.

I had trouble finding employment in the immediate area at first. My then boyfriend didn’t want me bartending in our new, but strange area – although that is actually how he met me, as a patron where I was slinging cheap domestic beer. I then went on to waitress at an Applebee’s across town. That was decent money when it was busy, but it was late hours and sporadic pay. I eventually found a job as a graphic designer at a larger newspaper than I had been used to in our hometown of Crawfordsville. The Martinsburg Journal was more the size of the Lafayette Journal & Courier. I stayed there and made a good wage, working my way up to supervisor of the entire 11 person design staff before the year was out.

For the first time in my life, I was enjoying financial freedom. I was not dependent upon my family, my boyfriend or anyone else. I was my own woman. Just when I was settling into this role, Jim’s arbitration hearing was held in Indiana. He had won the right to return to his job after nearly two years. He was returning to Indiana.

I was torn. I had followed him to Maryland. I had stayed with him because he had grown comfortable, familiar and loved. He had proposed, we were to be married “sometime” and I had started to make more money than I ever had before and realistically, since. I was not prepared to leave.

I couldn’t understand why he wanted to return to a town that was crumbling economically. Factories in Crawfordsville were reducing work forces. The local paper where I was employed for a time before we left was cutting staff even then. Our prospects looked bleak back in Indiana. With many reservations I resigned from my position at the Martinsburg Journal, amidst the upper management protesting the move and asking what it would take to keep me.

Again I bankrolled the move. The U-Haul had been traded in for a 24-foot Penske moving truck and a tow trailer for one of the cars. There were more boxes, more furniture and more worldly possessions to be hauled over the mountains on our return trip. Again we had no secure home upon our arrival. I had called my parents two weeks in advance and asked if we could invade their upstairs for a few weeks, not more than a month, as we looked for a new home. Again, I didn’t have any job prospects. It seems time does indeed circle back upon itself.

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