He paid for his tractor-tire repair with a check, painstakingly filling in the blanks with cramped penmanship and signing it with his characteristic, if undecipherable signature. I thanked him as he shoved the worn leather wallet inside the pocket of his patched carhart jacket, and then returned to my work, expecting him to do the same. Instead, he lingered….and I knew he wanted to talk.
 
“Things are getting bad out there.” he said, pausing to glance out the office window at a sky dirty with sand and windborne corn husks. “Yep, things are really getting bad”.

 
I supposed he was commenting on our drought-dry weather…on the blow-sand which drifts into rolling dunes with each big wind, or the tinder dry pasture grass and how it crackles into tiny bits underfoot. But that wasn’t it at all. His ‘out there’ encompassed far more than our familiar, winter-parched land. He was describing an alien world of Lear jets and wealthy CEO’s, and a disintegrating economy that was about to cost his aviation-mechanic son the job he had left the farm to pursue.  
 
The hard-luck stories come easy to some, as if in the telling the burden of it becomes lighter; to others the words come haltingly….embarrassment mingled with worry, sprinkled with anger.
 
Accounts of a newlywed daughter who lost her job as an interior design consultant, “She should have taken college courses that taught her something more useful than picking out wall-paper.”, and an unemployed father of two who can’t make the mortgage payments on his California home, “Dad, can we come back to Nebraska and live in Grandma’s old house until things straighten out?”
 
 With careers faltering, homes teetering on default, and empty pocketbooks the ‘kids’ look towards the sanctuary of home, to the safe haven of the farm they grew up on, secure in the knowledge their parents won’t turn them away, let them go hungry, or homeless.
 
And yet, at the same time, there are those who look away from our valley for security. “We hear there’s work in Gillette.”, confided a young mother as she counted out cash for a set of tires from a dwindling supply of dog-eared hundred dollar bills, the tax refund money a slim buffer between being just plain poor, and absolutely destitute.  “I guess we’ll go on unemployment if my husband can’t find a job there.” she said, not without some bitterness, and shame. “No one is hiring around here.” 
 
 “I’ll be glad to leave this place.”
 
There must be a million stories like these, maybe more, but these are mine, the ones I’ll remember when someday I’m asked, “Tell me about the Great Crash.”
 
What will you remember?

By Karen Ott

Category: Financial Struggles · Money