McGaha - Flat broke with two goats: a memoir

I was upstairs folding laundry when I heard the horn. From the wide porch window, I watched a blue car with a flashing yellow light on top ease around the bendthe mailman. Our mailbox stood next to the main road, almost a mile away from the house, and because our driveway was full of holes and bumps and sagging telephone wires, most delivery people left our packages there, wedged against the mailbox flag. In fact, since our move here to the woods, we had only had one other group of unexpected visitors, Jehovahs Witnesses who sprang from their car, stuck a leaflet on a window ledge, and were gone before I could get to the door.

So I knew the mailmans presence meant only one thing: certified mail. And I knew that certified mail meant only one thing: bad news. Still, I might as well get this over with. I threw down the towel in my hand and headed outside just as two of our five dogs, Hester, a yellow Lab mix, and Reba, a lanky Carolina dog, sprinted down the driveway. Yapping and snarling, they lunged at the mailmans tires.

Man, the mailman said, surveying me, the snarling dogs, the ramshackle house, the old outhouse, the pieces of scrap metal and scrap lumber strewn everywhere. I feel like Im in a Chevy Chase film.

Dont we all , I wanted to say. Dont we all.

I supposed he meant Funny Farm , the 1988 film where Chevy plays a New Yorker who moves to rural Vermont in search of rest and solace and instead finds mayhem. At best, it was a generous interpretation of our circumstances. We had lived here, in this century-old cabin in the mountains of western North Carolina, for six months. Still, in that moment just after I woke in the mornings, before my conscious mind was fully engaged, I often pictured myself back in my sun-soaked bedroom in the spacious Cape Codstyle house just a few miles from here, the house we had lived in for eight years, the house with finished ceilings and floors, where I had not once seen a venomous snake, where mice were an occasional occurrence rather than an everyday hazard.

I signed for the letter the mailman handed me and noted the name on the return address, an attorney in Asheville. Of course, I knew what it was. I had been expecting it for weeks, so now that it had finally arrived, it was, in a way, a relief. No longer was the foreclosure something that was going to happen. It was something that was currently happening , something I was already getting through, which meant, somehow, I might emerge, perhaps not unscathed but stable, sane, not a total wreck of a person. So I took the fact that I shushed my dogs and helped the mailman turn around in the drive to be a good sign, an indication that I would survive this, that someday, we would refer to the time our house was foreclosed in the past tense. It would be something that happened long ago, something barely worth mentioning. The house we lived in before the financial collapse , we would say. The home we lost just before things got better.

I had experienced this same kind of numb acquiescence several years before when my grandfather was dying. For months, I had been so consumed with grief and worry over his failing health that when he was actually lying in his hospice bed, his breaths low and raspy, the air filled with strange, acrid scents, something in me released. All those months of trying to keep him alive, of holding out hope that he might suddenly spring up and walk out of the hospital vibrant, spirited, whole, were over. As I sat next to his bedside, talking to my children, eating the casseroles people brought, grading student papers while he oscillated in and out of consciousness, I had thought, Maybe, just maybe, I can get through this .

During the Great Recession, millions of Americans lost their jobs, and millions of families lost their homes, so David and I were hardly alone in our circumstances. The greatest financial calamity since the Great Depression, the recession had struck rural Appalachia particularly hard. Here, many of us remained only one or two generations removed from the sort of hand-to-mouth existence our forebears had experienced.

Though the recession officially lasted less than two years, the ramifications continued long after that time. Jobs were scarce. Unemployment and underemployment were rampant, and real estate sales were virtually nonexistent. Three years after the official end of the recession, the year our home was foreclosed, foreclosure notices continued to splatter the local newspaper. Somehow, though, knowing we were not alone did not make our situation any easier. Instead, the thought of all those empty homesall those lives interruptedcompounded my loss, filled me with a greater sadness, the sum of all those broken parts.

Inside the cabin, I opened the envelope from the attorney. The papers outlined everything I already knew, skipping a few of the more salient points, such as how irresponsible and short-sighted we were for entering into a contract where our friends, Jeff and Denise, had owner-financed our home. Our kidstheir daughter and son and our three childrenhad grown up together. Their daughter, Jacqueline, and our older son, Aaron, had been particularly close. They met in kindergarten, back when Jeff and Denise still lived in the house we would later buy, and they had been good friends for the past fifteen yearsthree-quarters of their lives. Denise and I became friends too, in the way people do when their lives necessarily intersect, in that it takes a village sort of way people in small towns raise their kids. We emailed regularly, lunched sometimes, occasionally spent weekends with all of our kids at their summer cottage in nearby Montreat.