O' Oysters, come and walk with us! The Walrus did beseech...

You know how one day you are skimming along, suspecting nothing, and the next moment your canoe is in the water and all your supplies are getting wet? Well, that happened to us this week. John was laid off. And we live in Podunkville, East Texas, so this is pretty devastating to us actually. All of a sudden, I find myself seriously considering where else on the map we should be living. Perhaps these are decisions we have put off too long. I don't know. All I do know is that we don't want to go back to barely scratching out a living. Well, let me elaborate on that thought a little. We don't want to scrape by AND live in East Texas. In a grass hut in Fiji, yes. In the Ark-La-Tex, no. Hell no, even.

John and I came here ten years ago because real estate was cheap, and we felt we could live anywhere so long as we had each other. Believe it or not, we used to make steel wire sculptures for municipalities. John did most of the design and all of the manufacture part, and I went out and sold them to cities and small towns who were looking to dress up their squares and courthouse grounds, etc. It was fun, and occasionally (!) profitable. Here and there, John would pick up odd jobs and eventually he began doing remodeling projects, all with his unmistakably arty influence. We did an add-on one time that had a semi-circle wrap-around wall, all made of glass block. We did another, for a chi-chi little women's boutique, with these huge circus tents (for the dressing rooms) and fifteen foot tall columns with steel mesh flames coming out of the top. John designed and welded these crazy mannequins, with triangular curves and cast iron medallions for the heads. We did an elaborate, winding staircase at a large mausoleum here. More recently, he and I bought an old Victorian house in town, which had been badly burned. He rebuilt that staircase by hand, and he also made the master bedroom into a kind of treehouse, by vaulting the ceiling to cathedral height, then making a curtain wall of glass, looking out onto the huge oak tree there. When you are lying in bed, all you see is branch and sky.

In our own home, which we renovated ourselves, we have oil portraits of our daughters as winged angels painted on Greta's ceiling, with fluffy clouds all around. We painted the floor in Daria's room with baskets of fruit and lilies winding their way around the perimeter. I have handknitted the throw rugs. We dug a koi pond out back. Suffice it to say, that we both love for our environment to be entirely our own. Our financial situation has been tight at times, but we have always pulled through. This last job had been a kind of break from money stress and the myriad problems which are the hallmark of the self-employed. But now that job has evaporated, completely unexpectedly, and where do we go from here? In a way, the world is our oyster, ours' to conquer.

So why am I writing all this? Well, for one thing, it is our anniversary today and we both nearly forgot in the trauma and scramble of deciding what to do. But after eleven years and three children, all we really ask is for a quiet dinner and walk around downtown. Where do we go from here? Anywhere, so long as we have each other...