There are a great many changes coming to my life in 2018 and this is only one of them! I challenge you to try to spend more on your local community. It’s worth it, I promise.
That’s right! I will not be spending ANY money at any establishment that is not locally owned and operated. (Honestly, I think I’m going to miss Jimmy John’s the most.)
Here’s for starting over, huh? I do that a lot. Tennessee is gone. Florida is gone. Tennessee is gone again. Now I’m in Indiana. Next time I post I might be in Timbuktu but we’ll just have to wait and see about that.
Honestly, the main reason why I am posting this is because I have listed this as a website for the Perceiving A Life brand (which mostly lives on YouTube these days but you can check out all of the social media links in the About section) and it looks really bad on me to not have posted in so long. I doubt anyone will ever even read this but we’ll just have to wait and see about that as well.
Blogging is a good outlet, after all, and is a good out for awkward situations. Trying to look idly at your phone to avoid eye-contact but you don’t really have anything to do? Maybe you have no signal or you had to turn your data off before you had to sell a kidney to pay for the overage? This is good for those moments. I’ve put the app back on my phone and I’ll be posting when I can. It doesn’t take as much to post on here as it does on YouTube (which is good because I have found myself between WiFi providers at the moment).
If anyone’s still out there *talking in to the empty void that is my fan base* feel free to check out what I’ve been up to on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (in order of post frequency).
Until next time,
Claire
Spring has sprung here in rural West Tennessee. The worst winter in about a decade has finally released its frosty grip on this red clay soil. What was brown and dead is now green and thriving again. There could be no better metaphor for my life as of late.
Yes, I have come back to Tennessee and, while I can’t say that I am happy about the circumstances regarding my return, I am more than happy to be home. The frosty grip has been lifted and I am thriving again even if only in very small ways.
The garden has been planted. The seeds have been sewn. The red clay soil has been worked and nutrients have been added to improve its quality. In a few seasons, if the hard work continues, it will be something to be reckoned with. There is so much promise and hope for the future.
There are other projects in the works for the fairly near future. Two tables like the one I designed and helped to build in Florida (pictured below) will be built to suit the needs of my ever-growing extended family. Much furniture that came from my grandmothers house will receive new life. There will, of course, be pictures and details in the coming days.
Yes, there is much promise and hope for the future. I could not be more thankful for the wonderful family that I have been blessed with. I am also eternally grateful to the incredible friends that I made in Florida. Both parties encouraged me to do whatever I needed to do to achieve my dreams. I am proud to say that, while I am still a bit flighty with the desire to go and experience other things, my heart remains firmly rooted in this red clay soil.
Until next time,
Claire
This will be the first Mother’s Day in four years that I’ll be able to spend with my mom. Before now, I couldn’t bring myself to visit her grave. It hurt too bad. I haven’t been to see her since her funeral, actually, which will have been five years ago this July. This year, though, I hope things can be different.
My mom knew the triumphs and the struggles associated with being a mother better than anyone I can think of. She understood the lovey-dovey parts of being a mother to two girls as well as the traumatic and unexpected pain of losing her first child, an unborn son. She knew how it felt to struggle and succeed in raising a family in tough financial situations, but she also felt the crushing blow of being told in her early thirties that she would never again be able to carry a child. She was the mother of one child with a birth defect and another with common learning disabilities. She was a compassionate conquerer, a wise genius, and the most giving individual that I have met in my life.
This week, I am praying for all of the families and individuals who have mixed emotions – or even plain hatred – in their hearts for this holiday. I pray for all of the exhausted mothers with children, the bereaved mothers without children, the lost children without mothers, the fathers who wear two hats, and all of those who wish to become mothers but can’t.
You only get one mother. I think that’s what makes this holiday so hard for so many of us. No matter how you try to fill the hole in your heart – whether it’s a mother, grandmother, child, etc. – nothing and no one can take the place of someone you’ve lost. To those who understand, I am sorry for your pain; I know it all too well.
In spite of the pain, the loss, the longing, and the way that society tries to tell you how to feel, I do wish you all a Happy Mother’s Day.
From one motherless child to the masses in mourning,
Claire
What do you know about your local economy? We talk about supporting small businesses and buying products that are made here in the USA, but why does that come second to a sale on an imported good? Why do we have to have Small Business Saturday to remind us to support our local entrepreneurs? We talk about a floundering economy but we are so willing to give our money for goods and services rendered from foreign lands when we could so easily keep some of that money right here by shopping locally.
Now, before I get into trouble up here on my soap box, I have to say that I am not so high-and-mighty in my small-town Americanness that I would ever bash another country or culture. There is nothing inherently wrong with buying imported goods and it is not the purpose of this post to belittle anyone who chooses to shop at supermarket chains, but let me pose a scenario to you:
Let’s say you spend $40 per week at the supermarket of your choice on fresh fruits and vegetables. You get the things you like, many of which have been imported, and everyone in your family gets fed. Easy enough, right? Well what if you took your $40 to the local farmer’s market or produce stand? You got everything you wanted, you were going to buy it anyway, and the supermarket is not going to miss your $40 contribution to their bottom line, but that $40 can help to pay the rent cost for the person running the stall at the farmer’s market or the produce stand. When you go to the local hardware store and pay $2 more for the same brand tool or product that you would find at a larger home improvement store, you keep alive the dream that the proprietor had when they opened up shop in the first place. That money that you were going to spend anyway is not just money in their pockets like it is with the CEO’s of large corporations, it’s food on the table for their families just like it is for yours.
So I ask again, what do you know about your local economy? How many self-employed individuals work within 10 miles of you who would be honored to provide you with their goods and services? How many have you not even thought of or met yet? The next time you are given the opportunity to make your community a better, more-rounded place to live, please don’t hesitate to do so. Please buy small.
A year is only 24 hours experienced 365 times in a row. As we get older it seems like the years come and go faster and faster. Sometimes you wake up, realize that your year has passed, and it feels like you’ve barely blinked it by. While it is happening, though, dragging on day by day, it can feel like a year will never end. This last year, at least for me, has been mighty peculiar compared to the last 20 I’ve experienced.
This year has consisted of two overnight, cross-country road trips that culminated in a move out-of-state. It has seen me take up no less than five new jobs that are all unique but somehow quite the same. It has seen me work hard and move into a beautiful brick house on a lake with the man I love. It has seen changes unlike any others I have yet to encounter.
Beginning with what I knew, I planted a fruitless garden and kept on planting until I found something new that would grow here. I began raising six chicks, buried one, and loved the remaining five all the more for it. I have been exploring how much of their own food that two people can grow and raise on less than 0.1 acres in town. I have made myself stronger from the fruits of my labor.
I have given my collie more room to run and when my cat ran away I gave her a home to which she might return. I’ve seen the unfortunate deaths of two good cars after unbelievable breakdowns, both automotive and emotional, and found out how hard it is to get a new one on my own. I’ve worked for little more than peanuts and prayed for the day that I could afford a shoe-string budget. I have learned exactly what it is like to start over from scratch.
This past year has seen the birth of three new cousins, a handful of weddings, a heartbreaking number of funerals, and one very important high school graduation back home – all of which occurred no less than 850 miles from where I am now. Yes, this year has been pretty lonely for this girl, but I don’t regret it. I have grown up a lot, too, you see. You have to learn to lean on yourself and the community that you build when you strike out on your own – away from your family and everything you’ve ever known to a place where so many before you have only found failure.
Success does not have to be measured in nice things or the infrequency with which the bill collectors call, but the happiness that you find along the way to the life you’ve always dreamed of. It’s hard to remember the misery that accompanied the beginning of this year-long journey and think that I should ever be happy again, but if happiness is not what I’ve found, it is contentment and I can live with that – at least until next year…
– Claire
Who in their right mind goes looking for employment in a greenhouse in October? My sixteen-year-old self didn’t think anything of it, though. It was a small yet sprawling compound of all things green and leafy just off Highway 45. The parking lot was littered with different piles of stone, clearance rose bushes, pumpkins and square hay bales, as well as a myriad of odd cement sculptures waiting for paint or glaze. The store front itself was mostly white with plenty of windows and sliding glass doors. It was open in the back to the nursery. Three other greenhouses could be found just to the south of the main building.
The inside had murals painted on the walls of vines, leaves, and flowers while the uneven concrete floor boasted what would have been a rather impressive impression of a water feature; now it was scuffed and chipped by the many carts of vegetation going in and out. Sorghum molasses, raw honey, and all manner of jam were available for purchase and displayed on an old, ten-foot trailer in the middle of the showroom floor. Potting soil and fertilizer all lay in sorted stacks along three of the walls and separating the public from the nursery was an old-timey wooden counter filled with glass-front drawers for holding seeds. This counter, though it seemed fragile and dirty from age and use, was charged with holding up what seemed to be two of the first electric cash registers ever made as well as a tired-looking, sun-darkened old man who said he was the owner.
“I don’t have any work for ya right now, season’s almost over. M’ wife and I are ’bout to go on vacation ‘fore the holidays hit. Try back with me in February.”
That’s exactly what I did. Trudging through the slush of a would-be snow, I put in my application for my very first job at that old, wooden counter, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the Feed ‘N Seed store went under about ten years prior.
At first, I didn’t get the job, but one of their long-time employees took a housekeeping job at the local university so that her son, a very bright boy, would have the chance to go to a private institution tuition-free. She trained me a bit and I worked with her mostly on the weekends, but I was glad to be rid of her during the week because she was a mean-spirited woman who didn’t know how to watch her tongue – or simply didn’t care to do so.
I worked there nearly every day after school during the spring semester of my senior year doing transplants, watering the starters, and running the cash register for minimum wage. My employment ended shortly after Mother’s Day because by that point those who were going to garden already had it in the ground and those who waited until May to plant probably wouldn’t end up fooling with it.
From there, I worked at two different gas stations in the surrounding area. One was privately owned and my employment lasted just three short weeks. I was fired for going on vacation, although I already had permission to do so. I quit the other one after another three weeks and vowed that it would be my last job in a gas station. The assistant manager could hardly manage to function after her mid-morning blunt and was certainly no help to someone such as myself who required more guidance than she was capable of supplying. When I quit, I had to write a letter to corporate explaining why things didn’t work out. I sang like a canary and when I went in to pick up my last paycheck, she was there to confront me. I held my own and she was fired shortly thereafter for failing a drug test because the general manager wasn’t there to skew the results in her favor.
After dealing with the lowest of the low, I scored a great job for a huge corporation as a “package handler”. It was summertime still. The warehouse was scorching hot and both the work and the hours were grueling. From 3:00AM until 8:00AM, I sorted packages as part of a team of three in my very first pair of steel-toed boots. This job, too, proved to be too much and after months of my paycheck being wrong and my supervisor denying my requests to speak to the warehouse manager, a dear, personal friend of mine, about the issues, I snapped. I said some unkind things to that woman and never showed up to work again. Within a week, the deficits in my pay had been resolved but I was still out of a great job that I never should have quit, as I was just six months shy of receiving benefits.
I was jobless and desperate when a friend of mine arranged for me to be his replacement when he left his food service job at a small, family-owned BBQ restaurant inside of a gas station just off of the interstate. It was here that I met He-Man. He was kind and helpful with a willingness to do good work in spite of the overbearing manager. He was the reason I lasted six months at this job before conflicts with the schedule and co-workers alike caused me to walk away from yet another dead-end job.
Then, I went to the Kitchen. My bills were piling up and for a while I resorted to selling plasma at clinics around town just to make ends meet, but eventually it just wasn’t enough. Against my better judgment, I agreed to take a sort of under-the-table job at a small-town restaurant where I worked as a waitress for tips only – no wage. I was lucky to make $50 at the end of a ten-hour day but the other waitresses and I had been lucky. Those in the kitchen were only paid $3/hr under the table – $30 per day. The owner was a mean, hateful man who used the Bible to cover his filthy trail of lies and deceit. I was looking for another job anywhere and everywhere when he cornered me behind the bar and proceeded to yell at me in front of God and everyone about the things I had done and how I was “trashy” and “stupid”. I left there sobbing and afraid.
I left the kitchen and went straight to another restaurant across town and – still sobbing and distraught – begged the owner, a favorite customer of mine, for a job. She heard my story and hired me on the spot. It was a risky move for her because, while she paid her waitresses a bit more than minimum wage, her restaurant was struggling and she really couldn’t afford another waitress. I was so grateful that she would take a chance on me like that and I promised that I would not let her down. While I was not her pet, per say, I was her most trusted employee. Soon after I was hired, she tried to give me hours and responsibility wherever she could. With no experience to speak of, she had me cook some, prep more, bake cakes, do dishes, keep inventory, make bank deposits, and more. She gave me back the confidence that was destroyed during my time in the Kitchen. She cared for me greatly and was sad to see me go when I decided to move to Florida. I felt bad leaving her the way I did but she was truly glad that I had found myself and would be making a life for myself somewhere. She hated to see me struggle financially just because I depended on her struggling business to support myself.
This brings me to where I am now. I am working three jobs: two as a waitress, one doing commercial cleaning. He-Man is still a cook but he loves his job now and is more than thankful to be rid of the BBQ place just off the interstate. He worked there for two and a half years for minimum wage with not so much as a “keep up the good work”. Now, he is being evaluated for his second raise in the three months that he has been at his new job and could not be more proud of himself. We do the cleaning together, working as a team for his uncle’s business. Although we work long, hard hours, we can’t help but feel blessed because we know we didn’t have these kinds of opportunities in Tennessee.
I’ve worked some pretty bad jobs, but I’ve also given up some pretty good ones out of stupidity. I’m older and wiser now and I hope to keep myself from making the same mistakes again. I have shown myself that I am stronger and more capable than I ever imagined. They say that you reap what you sow and I am so proud to say that I am definitely reaping the benefits of all my hard work.
Claire
Where do I even begin?
I’ve been gone from WordPress for about three months and let me tell you – I’ve been BUSY! When I last posted, I mentioned that we would be visiting Central Florida for He-Man’s birthday. We made it successfully and during the week that we were vacationing, we both came across job opportunities that far surpassed anything that had been made available to us in West Tennessee. Since you can probably guess where this is going, I’ll just come out and say it: We are now living in Central Florida.
Crazy, I know. In the last three months, we have busted some booty trying to save up enough money to get into our own place and I’m pleased to say that we have been blessed with a beautiful little house in a small town not unlike the one we left behind. It has everything we wanted and more – PLUS we’re paying less than we would with an apartment in the city and now I have a lake view in the country. Isn’t it wonderful?!
I do greatly miss the life I left behind. After all, it’s all I’ve known for all of my twenty years. Since I’ve been in Florida, I have missed the birth of two new cousins, the marriage of another, and the high school graduation of my baby sister. I’ve only been back to Tennessee once since we decided to stay here and He-Man didn’t come with me. I quit my dead-end job, called one of my best friends to ride down with me, gathered up the pets, and drove the 808 miles to my new home with only what would fit into every nook and cranny of a ’98 Honda Civic (which isn’t much, just so you know). It is a drive that I will never, ever make again if I have anything to say about it.
We have started completely over with nothing. We left our furniture, clothes, and relationships behind us. I am now working three jobs at about 60hrs per week and He-Man matches those hours with only two jobs. While it is a lot of hard work, we are doing quite well for ourselves and have even found ourselves in a new tax bracket. That’s not bad for two, virtually uneducated twenty-somethings, even if I do say so myself.
There are several other things that I do need to update on here, such as the resolution of the Great Cake Debacle of 2014, but they will be saved for another post. In the mean time, I will keep hoping that while I was gone, I had not been forgotten by my few, lovely readers.
Take care,
Claire
Let me just throw this out there: He-Man showed out!
![IMG_1138[1]](https://perceivingalife.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/img_11381.jpg)
I mean, I did have to leave out the sale paper with the necklace circled, the after-tax price calculated, AND remind him that the paper had not been laying under his face so conspicuously for no reason, but he pulled through. Then he surprised me with flowers. There was a semi-torrential downpour laying siege to this little corner of nowhere when I heard a knock at the door. Angel, of course, brought it upon herself to try to take this unknown interloper down. When I finally got her penned up – still barking – in the bedroom, I was able to let this soggy little man into my house. It was the local florist.
![IMG_1139[1]](https://perceivingalife.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/img_11391.jpg)
Now, before you all go judging me on the clutter and candy in the background, allow me to inform you that I am packing five days in advance to go to Tampa for He-Man’s birthday. ‘Cause I’m sweet like that. And I guess that’s why I ended up with flowers. I have had a long, disappointing string of relationships over the last few years but I can honestly say that the last year with He-Man has been time well-wasted. I say wasted only because we both agree that we should be doing a little more with our lives, but I digress. We have had time to get to know one another on an everyday, in-your-face level and I love it. I also love him. He is so sweet, thoughtful, caring, and all the other mushy stuff that people say about “the one”. He is also capable of leaving me speechless with a note that came with the flowers:
Claire, I love you so much! I could never picture a day without you, sweetheart. Sunshine or rain, every day with you is a blessing. Love, Your He-Man.
…..!!!
The part that really got me was that he actually signed it “Your He-Man” because he is trying to support my attempts at blogging in leu of a real social life since waiting tables makes me hate people. His support means everything to me and I know that I have it no matter what.
This has been the best Valentine’s Day I’ve ever had – hands down – and I even spent the later part of it in the ER being treated for a moderate laceration on my finger. I tried going for the gold in can-opening and failed miserably, but that’s another story for another day. The stupid Russian judge low-balled me anyway. Until next time, I will be basking in the glory that is He-Man and, for those of you who have stayed with me this long, thanks for reading.
Claire
A favorite post from one of my favorite blogs! I read the posts in my half-cigarette breaks (because lets face it, when you only have 10min to smoke, pee, and steal food, no one gets their full nicotine fix) and it helps get me through the shift… Enjoy this all-too-common occurrence.
A couple orders food together. Man gets a plain hamburger and the female gets a hamburger ketchup only. They call me back to the table and the man says he ordered it plain but got ketchup and the girl says she wanted ketchup but got a hamburger plain. I still don’t know if they were trolling but all I could do was gesture for them to switch hamburgers as I was dumbfounded.
-Kelly
Perceiving a Life 