Breathing Easy is Damn Hard

I can breathe.

I can breathe deeply and calmly for the first time in almost half a century, and it feels foreign and dangerous.

I was able to stop worrying about my own physical and mental safety the moment I met Gomez, but then we were plunged into his health issues almost immediately, and they plagued him/us till the day he died. For almost three decades, I fought every single day to keep him safe, and well, and with us.

Losing Gomez was a physical and bloody rendering of my heart into two halves, and inside my chest crouches the jagged clump that I'm left with, almost a year and a half later still an open wound, but still beating, damn it. The other half is safe with Gomez, and he keeps it in his jacket pocket, calmly reaching in every so often to pet and comfort it like a bedraggled and lost duckling. 

He's taking very good care of it.

I had the farm and Air BnB's to take care of, and with that income and my job that I'd had for 30 years, I was financially afloat with some stability to balance on.

When I lost that job, I wasn't even emotionally hurt. Honestly, I haven't missed it one single minute, and felt zero pangs of sadness or regret unsubscribing to every organization and newsletter and feed that fleshed out who I was professionally. 

As I told my boss the day he fired me, I'd lost Gomez. Unless something happens to someone I gave birth to or their progeny, nothing else can hurt me. It was, after all, just a fucking job.

After realizing that no one wants to hire a 60+ pear-shaped old lady for...any position that would still allow me to run my Air BnB's, I changed up my marketing and pricing for those and was able to tenuously make enough to get by, along with my social security check. 

I could, however, be even more secure with some updates to the property that would make my place even more desirable to book. If I had the money to do it. And the aforementioned "tenuously" does not allow for that.

Over Christmas, my mom* offered to throw in to do the above improvements. Now. Our relationship has been fractious at best ever since my rebellious teen years, so this came as a thunderbolt out of the sky. I asked Gomez if he had appeared to her as three ghosts on Christmas Eve, and he's not saying anything either way, but I will forever believe that he did. 

He would move Heaven and Earth to make sure I'm OK.

*Yes. My mom. I'm 64 and my mom is still very much alive and teaching quilt classes. Women on both sides of our family tree live to be at least 100, then something pisses them off and they die mad about it.

So, the things I never thought in a million years would get done are being done. The old century barn full of junk and cobwebs that I promised would be a gathering place someday is becoming a gathering place with tables and chairs and a conversation area and electricity, with a big firepit and grills and picnic tables out in front of it. Rental of these areas will work in tandem with the guest cottages.

Guests will be able to use them at no extra charge.

People who want to have a private event will need to rent both cottages for the duration of their event, and there will be allowed tent camping, so long as their group doesn't exceed a dozen people, as that's the maximum amount of people the barn will comfortably hold and the maximum amount of activity the two bathrooms in the cottages can handle. All in, a group holding an event from Friday night thru Sunday morning will spend about $300, still a pretty good deal. 

Repairs are also being made for the safety and comfort of all the farm's residents and guests. 

For instance, I now have a dryer, inside my house, for the first time in over two years, and I don't have to do laundry between guests, running it over to whichever cottage is momentarily empty. It's a small thing that's really a big fucking deal. 

With my last expected tax return, the Cavy Cabana got a renovation, in a nod to my creeping decrepitude and all. 

When I decided that the Air BnB's would be my main income, I made a promise that I would write more (at all), and I wasn't doing too badly until the whole farm project was thankfully dropped into my lap. That's all almost done, so there will come a day, I so decree, when I will be able to burrow down into large chunks of time, and just...write. 

But for now, I watch and direct these improvements that will be further life-changing (in a good way for once), knowing that Gomez is watching them, too, and in the down time, 

I can breathe.

The barn, which will be known as The Treehouse, about 2/3 finished. There are two tree sentinels; one at the front door and one at the back door, helping support the 100-year-old structure on their equally aged shoulders.