Along with the rest of the country, my husband and I have watched our stocks (in a local bank), our 403b and 401k tank. I keep trying to be positive and think that they will recover and as all things cyclical, they will. But, our country has never been through this bad of an economic downturn before, and I keep wondering if my financial assets really will come back to their previous levels and if they will go beyond that. Both my husband and myself had parents that grew up during the depression. When I was a child, my maternal grandmother had a basement full of home canned goods, and was almost fanatical about growing a very large garden every year and making sure she had food for the upcoming year. A child of the 1970's and a teenager of the 1980's, I really did not understand my grandmother at all. Even though my parents didn't have much money, I never went without food (hamburger gravy...YUCK!), shelter, or clothing (even if it was second-hand). For my grandmother, however, it was a different story and being poor at the begining of the depression, and then surviving the depression with two small children and a husband to take care of is unfathomable for me. My mother would often mention stories of living in a chicken coop while they tried to build the farmhouse that I was familiar with, but like all kids just assumed their parents were exaggerating a little. Now, I'm not so sure.

My grandmother passed away April 1, 1986 at the age of 78, and up until her death, she continued to raise that garden every year. She started seeds in the basement even before all the snow was gone in the yard. She had a huge fenced in area that was once the part of the horse pasture, and had a permit from the DNR to shoot the woodchucks that tried to consume the efforts of her hard work. As one of her four grandchildren, I was put to work weeding and tending that garden when I would stay with her for a few weeks in the summer. I hated it. To this day, I can remember whining about it, doing a half-hearted job, and consuming all the ripe strawberries when she wasn't looking. I'm sure she knew, but never said anything. She grew everything from fruits to nuts. And then, the canning would begin. If I thought the weeding was bad, canning was worse. Hours and hours of prepping the food, the jars, the lids, the mashers, sieves, and spices. Hot, sweaty, weary, and sick of smelling vinegar and cooked food. Still, it never once sunk in to my self-centered kid brain that for grandma, this wasn't a hobby. This was her survival. This was how she survived the roughest economic time in America's history.

Now, close to 23 years after her death, our country is facing far worse economically than what my grandmother went through, but I still don't feel the need to start growing a garden. But, that isn't because the lesson of my grandmother's struggle was completely lost to me. At some point, her tendencies to, oh, let's say, stock-up and grow her own food, was replaced with I'll buy extra when on sale and stock up that way. She understood that the only person she should really rely on was herself. There was no need in her eyes for the government or the taxpayers to solve her financial woes. I am always amazed at folks who do not take advantage of sales or are not willing to buy an off brand to save money. Or even worse, just walk into a store and buy items higgly-piggly with no regard to price, name-brand, sale, or quantity. I'm continually floored when I see other people's shopping carts in stores filled with very expensive items that are really nothing but packaging and no substance. Or have non-essential items like alcohol or cigarettes. Yet, these are the same people who cry that they cannot feed a family on $100 a week, and that's true when you buy nothing but non-sale brand-name items that are more convenience than substance.

I also can't help but compare my grandmother's take-care-of-herself-spirit with all the folks clamoring for hand-outs, buy-outs, help-outs, bail-outs, and the flat-out gimmes. Many of whom got themselves into these predicaments of needing taxpayer money because they were selfish, greedy, and self-centered. Not all are, and to help the folks who TRULY need it I'm glad to do it. But, they are such a small minority that it wouldn't even register on the evening news in any other time but the gimme, gimme, gimme time we are in now.

I'm angry because my husband and I did everything right. We kept full-time jobs and steadily built our lives up the way we were taught you should do it. Rent until you can afford the house, buy a house within your means, eventually you'll sell that house and buy a bigger one, pay off that mortgage, and save for your retirement with a 401k and a 403b. We did EVERYTHING we were supposed to, paid our mortgage off four years early because we put extra money to the principal every month and still put money away for retirement. We don't carry credit card debt and bought our last two cars with cash. Oh, and those two cars? Normal cars that get good gas mileage and not the giant honking SUV's that cost more than both of them together. So why, then, are we now watching all of our hard work evaporate AND not only have our savings gone but have to bail-out dead-beats who just spent, and spent, and spent and never ONCE thought that this would come back to bite them in the ass?

Yeah, I'm angry. And, if I have to start growing a garden so I can have food in the coming year, I will be cursing every dead-beat to eating hamburger gravy forever for every seed I have to put in the ground. But, it will be my ground, paid for with my money, not taxpayer money, and unlike most of the dead-beats I'll be bailing out who won't even think twice about where that money is coming from, I will still be thankful that I did things the right way and know that my grandmother and parents would be very proud of me.

Migraines

I suffer from migraine headaches. I've had them since I was a young girl, my sister suffers from them and my mother also had them. This past weekend, (Feb. 28th) I woke up at 3am with a pain so intense on the right side of my head it felt like someone was shoving a flaming hot saber through my eye and up and out the back of my head. I would have confessed to anything to stop that pain. I even denied it when I first woke, telling my husband, "My head is killing me, but I don't think it is a migraine." I hate migraines and usually try to deny they are happening when they do strike. They are a whole body experience for me, the pain, nausea, sound and light aversion, tactile over-stimulation, and the pain. Yes, I know I mentioned that twice. I always laugh at the migraine commericals that show a person up and at whatever activity they were doing an hour before they took the medicine that eliminates their symptoms.

It doesn't really work that way.

I have both over-the-counter and prescription medicines to try to prevent them and to treat them when they do strike. For some reason my daily Rx meds are not doing too well as I'm two for two in 2009. I had one January 1st (that's a good way to start off a new year) and then this one yesterday. The Rx med I took to actively treat one did work for me, but not until I slept for several hours and took an OTC med with it that has aspirin, caffeine, and acetaminophen in it. I had to take several more doses of that yesterday too. So, no, after an hour I wasn't "up and at 'em" like the TV commercials.

My point in divulging all my migraine history is that in the past, I have heard mention (from non-migraine sufferers) that these headaches are just exaggerated from the people claiming to suffer from them. That we are somehow trying to get attention, or that we want a day off of work, or that they really aren't that bad, and if you watch the TV commercials, they aren't. The active mom just pops her OTC or Rx meds and the next thing you know she's running around in the yard with the kids! Nothing could be further from the truth. Maybe I don't have the right meds, but just trying not to throw the pills up is a major milestone in the course of a migraine for me. Running? Cognitive thinking? No, that's not going to happen for many hours yet.

Sometimes I get a visual aura before the major symptoms hit. It's like looking through a kaleidoscope of broken crystal that shimmers like sunlight on water. I know that most people who suffer from aura have different types of it, but mine starts on one side of my visual field and progresses toward the other side, blocking my vision for as long as an hour. Whether I close my eyes or not, it's the same sight. I've come to think that it's my brain trying to figure out why it's being assaulted by its own blood vessels and trying to fight back. Yeah, yeah, corny, I know. What it is anyway, is an early warning for me to take something RIGHT NOW, because what's coming is going to be hell if I don't. However, if the aura occurs in the middle of the night when I'm sleeping, I can't do anything about it until I wake up feeling like I'm being stabbed in the head.

So, if you are reading this and happen to be one of the people who thinks that migraine sufferers are just exaggerating their headaches, you are wrong. Just plain wrong and despite what the TV would have you believe, we won't be up and running a few minutes after taking whatever product is being hawked on the screen. Unless we are running for the bathroom and hoping the pain of throwing up won't send us into a seizure.