Kaboom.

June 20, 2009 annora
Tags: Ariella, Drew, Money

Life is funny sometimes, don’t you think? For every good thing that happens, something equally as bad comes a long as well.

Drew and I received incredibly happy news a couple weeks ago. The last property in Victoria had sold for above market price, which means we’ll be getting a large sum of cash at the end of August. We were exultant. We can pay off our house in full, get a new furnace, get a new car, fix our plumbing, buy new appliances, and still have enough cash to make a very nice retirement nest egg. One could not hope for better news than that.

However, on the tail end of this news not more than a day later, I received a very troubling call from my big sister, Ariella. She’d been struggling to survive up in Alaska for the past 5 years. Her pipes had frozen and burst a few years ago during the winter, and she had lived without a shower in her own home since then. Her and her husband (Perry) had instead gone to family members houses every day to shower, they’d been doing this for so long. They had finally saved up enough money to replace the shower, and almost had enough to fix the pipes, but life decided to throw them a curveball instead.

Their septic tank exploded, filling their back yard with raw sewage. Unfortunately, this wasn’t even the worst news. Perry’s dad was arrested and given his third DUI, and he’s still in jail right now. As a result of this, Perry’s job was lost, as he worked for his dad doing commercial painting. Now they had no income, an exploded septic tank, no bathroom, their house was falling apart around them… And so, Ariella called me in utter despair and asked for help.

They’re moving to Madison, Wisconsin in a few weeks. They’re leaving their house behind, throwing everything they own in a U-Haul trailer, and driving from North Pole, Alaska to Wisconsin. My family is scraping together everything they can in this rough time, everyone’s feeling the effects of the economic crisis, but we’ve banded together to help my big sister and her husband start over fresh in a new state.

I can only hope that nothing else goes wrong, my poor sister is stressed out enough as is. I couldn’t believe how unfair it was that Drew and I got some of the happiest news of our lives, while my sister’s life fell apart. Fuck you, universe.

Entry Filed under: Family

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