Make, spend, repeat if desired.

Years later, visiting the calves with my Aunt Linda and sister, Bethany.

I was probably thirteen years old when I was hired for my first job. I know that sounds alarming, but hear me out. I grew up on a dairy farm, and this "job" of mine was waking up every Saturday and Sunday at what I considered a very early hour to bottle feed the sweet-faced black and white baby cows. The older baby cows needed to slurp their milk from buckets, so I mixed powder formula with water from a hose, and poured the concoction, always with ample spilling into my rubber boots, into the troughs. 

I still remember those soggy boots squishing as I walked through mud to get past the rusty gates, the heavy bucket of milk weighing down the left side of my body as moved. Slipping and sliding, trying not to spill too much. 

There was a lot of schlepping and it was dirty, no matter how you cut it. Afterward, I was sticky and I smelled. I went back in the evenings to give the baby cows dinner. It paid five dollars. A day. Ten dollars a week.

Ten dollars a week was just enough to get me the best Bonnie Bell Lip Smacker flavors money could buy. If I wanted something big, I saved for it. And by something big, I mean fancy shampoo and conditioner that my dad wouldn't want to use. Hello Herbal Essences!

I miss the days where bubble gum flavored chap-stick was all I needed. I fast-forward through twenty years of education, jobs turning into careers, and I find myself here at Lancaster Land, with an income substantially higher than ten dollars a week.

We dispose of our disposable income quickly, just like I used to do. 

I buy groceries. Wine. MAC Lipstick because I'm a grown up. Diapers. Craft beer because I live in Oregon. I'm also buying yards of concrete and lumber and light fixtures and flooring and paying an electrician to wire the Lancaster Land addition. Things have gotten serious.

When we need to buy bigger things, like seven thousand dollars worth of drywall, we save. And then, we spend.

At the age of thirteen, when I got "off" work, I remember riding my bike down the long, narrow farm driveway. I remember climbing hay bales with my sister and my cousins. I drank whole milk and I was so relaxed, I didn't know that "relaxation" was a thing.

Enjoying a Red Chair IPA during a flooring break.

Today, my workday ends, and if the house is clean, and dinner is made, I find myself applying paint to freshly textured walls, or teaching myself how cut the new flooring with a chop saw so I can then teach myself to install it, all after the baby is sleeping and the baby monitor is working overtime.

Money is relative. Work is required. We make it, we spend it, and if we want to keep moving forward, we repeat the process. Just like I did with the Herbal Essences when I was thirteen. 

XOXO

Meagan