The 8$ car wash.

This week I had sometime before the AEL meeting, and so I drove around a bit until I found a car wash.  It was 8$.

So why would an eight dollar car wash be so significant?  It was significant because for the first time in four years I had the money, the time, the effort, and energy to spend on it. It was weird.

I sat in the car wash with the radio playing and it occurred to me. This wasn’t our last eight dollars for the week. We didn’t have to hold onto those eight dollars like gold-- to use on gas or hay. Then having to  stretch  out those last eight dollars worth of gas to  work  for the whole week, or one bale  of hay to  last for four days-  which  would mean one feeding a day (not two ) and of much  less then the horses would need. Meanwhile sweating it out in the hopes that nothing else happened, like a blown tire, or one of the horses getting sick, or one if us getting sick and needing cough medicine that would mean no gas or no hay, and us wishing for our eight dollars back.

I wasn’t so  mentally and emotionally  exhausted from  stress-  what that  meant was that   I actually had the presence of mind to  think to  myself- hey the van  is nasty-  I should surprise my slave and  do something.  I went to three places to find the kind of working car wash that I wanted.  I wasn’t driving fast, or worried that I should be conserving gas money or time. I wasn’t so exhausted at that the thought of having to do one more thing - that I felt pushed to my edge. 

It was the mundane. The ordinary. It was what normal people do in normal lives when their cars are dirty. It felt good. Foreign.

And afterwards I went to AEL with my new looking van-  which  is blue by the way-  and before I went into  the restaurant I looked the van over, all sparkly and clean. And I was relaxed, even giddy.  This is what a normal life feels like.

The funny part was that after AEL when I was leaving, I walked over to one of the dirty vans in the parking lot- because I thought it was mine!

It was then that I realized that after all of this time and effort-  that  things really are getting better, slowly, as we financially, emotionally and physically recover from the last few years of our life. All of our work  to  change our situation was paying off, and I was rewarded with  an 8$ car wash.

How lucky am I?