It turns out that even without a job, my life is impossibly busy. Babysitting, playing a minor supporting role at the Ronan Farmer’s Market, gardening (AKA weeding), and working through oodles of paperwork for seemingly no reason other than to be rejected again and again. Yes, I’m talking about jobs. Yes, I’m talking about health insurance. I have a lot of feelings right now about insurance. I consider myself lucky because I have family and friends who won’t let me starve or go completely homeless, but … what must this be like for those who don’t have the same safety nets? Or for those who have to navigate this with children in the home?
I have been jobless before, but never insurance-less. I qualified for coverage under my parents’ plan after completing both undergrad and my MFA, which took a great deal of the pressure off when it came to the job hunt. Now I’m feeling the pressure, and I know that I’m not at my best when I’m rushing, as no doubt my housemates (past and present) and coworkers (ditto) can attest. Sometimes I wake up with bruises from where I dropped a thing or walked into a thing or both, and that’s when I know it’s time to ask someone’s forgiveness, even if it’s just my own.
I wonder what my grandparents would have to say about this. My mother’s folks, given their age difference, were either born or raised in the depths of the Dirty Thirties in rural Saskatchewan, at the heart of Palliser’s Triangle. Modern farming techniques and the rise of Big Ag have made the region an enormously productive breadbasket, but a lack of knowledge about arid-climate agriculture led to the kind of wind-driven (aeolian) erosion that led to the “black rollers” that ripped up to 75% of a farm’s prairie topsoil and dumped it on eastern cities like Chicago in massive drifts that put the 2020 doomsday predictions about Saharan dust clouds to shame. Generally, the further south your landholding, the more intense your topsoil loss. Even so, in the upper reaches of the Great Plains (called simply the Prairies in the north country), only six out of every ten applicants succeeded in acquiring their homestead patent in Saskatchewan prior to 1930. That number dropped still farther afterward, amounting to something of a fifty-fifty success rate, greatly favoring those who came from cooperative religious communities (like the Mennonites and the Hutterites) and those who already knew their way around a farm. If you wanted to make a $10 bet with the Canadian government that you could turn 65 acres of arid or semi-arid Prairie into 20 head of cattle or a working farm within three years, you were far more likely not to starve if you found yourself homesteading among others who were likely to lend a hand.
My grandparents survived long enough to buy an RV and move to British Columbia on the profits of the land, the majority of which survives, now under cultivation by a nice enough gentleman who let me, my parents, and my Uncle Verlan make off with a ritzy side-by-side to drive the old roads to the home quarter, the Greenfarm graveyard, and Aunt Karen’s remaining quarter. As far as I could tell, he’s not particularly religious, but he does some business with the Hutterites who have bought up much of the land to the north of what used to be family land. The Hutterites run a tight ship and an excellent seed-cleaning business, he noted, standing in the middle of a busy yard full of running processing equipment, grain bins, and the kind of tanks I’m used to reactive chemicals being stored in down in petrol country. It was neat as a pin, despite deep ruts in the semi-frozen mud.
The fact that my grandparents did well came down to the family’s famous work ethic and not to any direct family support. My grandmother, something of a “townie,” may very well have married my grandfather out of desperation to get away from a difficult home as much as love. (The “town” in question is the kind that my own dad used to joke had planted it’s entry and exit signs back-to-back. I’m pretty sure he got that idea from Hank the Cowdog, though.) My grandfather didn’t have a place of his own, yet, so he and his new bride moved in with his older brother’s family. This situation was not long bearable, either: I’ve heard tales about a strong push, a set of stairs, and my grandmother’s famously resilient body surviving the fall. Both grandparents came from farm-sized generations of around ten or more, so they were never truly without family interaction of some kind, but there was definitely a deep sense of solitude and going-it-alone-ness that I managed to pick up from family lore before they both were gone. They themselves would work the land only to happily, I think, leave it in an early retirement.
And work hard they did. Having visited the original home site, with some of the paddock boundaries and kitchen garden lines still visible if you squint just right, I now have a sense of the scale of their operation. My grandmother would have smiled (probably amusedly) at my current efforts at gardening, and she would probably have found a cure for the bindweed that ails me in five minutes flat. Her family, which would eventually max out at five daughters and one (much adored) latecomer son, more or less survived by eating the produce she grew, while my grandfather ran a fifteen-cow dairy operation to sell or trade for remaining necessities. There were chickens involved at some point, since it is routine family jokery that my mother chose to leave the farm as a teenager because she hated those chickens so intensely. (She still argues that she simply disliked the housework and house chores, and would hide in the hay loft with a book or trade them for outdoor farm chores when able––sans chicken chores.) Later, my grandmother took on washing as a side business for some folks in town. Where she found the time, I may never know, and I don’t imagine many Millennials of my generation could. While new batches of young families are always taking off to homestead these days, more people than ever before are spending their entire lives in an urban environment. I have a lot of hope that this will not always be true, that we will find gentler and more sustainable ways of introducing city dwellers to the farm and forest. But for now, what we have are mostly city-raised small-timers like me who grew up on National Geographic and PBS documentaries like Farmsteaders.
Which I am soon to watch, if I can lay my hands on it.
The first legislation to establish a government-funded universal health insurance program was passed in 1957. More was passed in ‘66 and ‘84. My grandparents lived through all those changes, and I through none. But then, I was mostly raised south of the Canadian border. Or south of the entire North American continent, really. I became interested in family history as a result of researching for my MFA thesis, which actually makes me deeply ashamed, even while I got lucky on the timing. My grandfather Jacob died in 2004, I think, and my grandmother Ruth became the family databank as a result of her phenomenal memory until she, too, passed in early 2014. I might have started the project for me, for my own writerly benefit, but by the time I finished I was part of an extended family in ways I’d never been before. And with that came emotions and ethical obligations that wouldn’t have fazed me at all if I hadn’t have been part of the Voth family in 2014. The loss of my grandmother was a crushing blow to a family rooted in the lore of a land long lost to them, and I’ve never quite been able to look at those feelings straight on in the years since.
I began this post out of deep frustration with the kind of healthcare system that milks the jobless for every last penny before offering aid. I am now one of countless beneficiaries of all of the compromises and erosions made to the Affordable Care Act after it was first stitched together in 2010. (Get out and VOTE, my friends!) I am looking at having to pay roughly $750 a month simply for the three generic medications I take. GoodRX and Walgreens’ prescription membership plan can only get me so far. This is not new information to me; I knew I might need to shell out that much if I was not accepted into Medicaid. (And I wasn’t.) If it weren’t for my medication, I would be able to live quite minimally while holding out for the perfect library job. But if it weren’t for my medication, I might not have been healthy enough to make it through the last four months. Timing is both the gift and the hardship itself; I am eternally grateful to the behavioral health specialists who put me on a path to good health just before a pandemic pulled the rug out from under all of us. I am grateful, even while Big Pharma turns out my last pocket.
“Money problems” have always been a source of anxiety for me. I was never copacetic with the prospect of being in debt, and the day I paid off my student loans felt like liquid sunshine. I enjoy the ice creams and pastries that money can buy, but I’ve always been pretty good at saying “no” when my budget calls for it. When I wasn’t saving for or actively spending on one degree or another, I was saving for my next move. (Between U-Hauls, hotels, petrol stations, and deposits, each move I’ve made as an adult has cost me about $2K.) My only major luxury expense since college has been book-buying, and I’m more or less at peace with my current austerity measures there. Someday I’ll be able to lavish my love on indie bookstores again, ideally before it’s too late and they all go belly-up as a result of the pandemic. To be perfectly honest, what ramps up my money-trouble-anxiety is a still more deep-seated fear: that having given up a job I really loved for reasons of sanity and self-respect, I now have nothing of value to offer the world. I’m not afraid of being poor; I’m afraid that the not being vested with Medicaid means I’m not worth anything to my government and therefore the world. Or perhaps that my value is measurable only by what I can contribute to a capital-driven economy. It’s terrible logic, yes, and I would never tolerate the idea if friends or coworkers expressed it about themselves––but it’s what my body seems to feel even as I try to talk it down from the logic-edge with my brain. I want to crawl into a hole and vanish.
Perhaps work ethic will come to my rescue the way it did to my grandparents. If nothing else, I’m motivated by the desire to keep my cat fed and healthy. Sput has another veterinary appointment this week to do with some teeth and gum issues. If antibiotics beat the issue down, wonderful, but there’s a potential for her to go under general anesthesia and have some teeth pulled. Her timing, as always, is impeccable. Of course I’ll do it! She’s the turdwaffle who gets me out of bed on rough mornings by wailing in my ear, or on days like today, by being unbearably cute and army-crawling up the bed to stick her nose directly in my mouth. It’s not quite as ennobling as a well-earned paycheck or as affirming as a child’s giggle over a well-picked book, but it’s very floofy and calming.
I’m still struggling with my reading. I’m now past six months into the reading equivalent of Writer’s Block, and it’s starting to look more like a habit or a new reality than a deviation from the norm. I’m even behind on reading emails, which is also unusual. I’m usually an email-obsessive. Any tips for ditching the Reading Rut would be gladly accepted.
The one upside of having a couple of low days with longer-than-average weepy-skied mornings is that I finally had a waking dream that I remember enough of to write something about it. I had lots of these as a teenager before academic fatigue set in, and I had to cut morning dreams out of my schedule. There’s something magical about being halfway between night and day, with a cat on patrol, for spinning up stories. I shouldn’t hope for more of these rainy days––I have a LOT of weeding to catch up on––but maybe there’s something left in that particular overdrawn account after all.
The record skips.
