My wife and I ate Chinese take-out tonight. My meal came with a fortune cookie whose fortune read: “Relax, you have all you need.”
I’m not one to take life advice from a cookie that tastes like cardboard, but it can’t be all wrong.
My home is small. One-story. Simple. There is a mobile home beside it. Across the street, there are three empty trailers, old, and covered in grime.
I own two rusted boats. One works. I have a workshed, and one orphaned dirt bike that needs its gaskets resealed. It sits beneath the shade of an oak tree, broadcasting to the world that my neck is a little red.
We live on a dirt road—a point of pride in our family. A few years ago, they tried to pave our street, but they didn’t pave our particular section of the road because my wife was standing in it, shouting death threats to the bulldozer driver.
My truck sits parked beside my boats. It is a Ford, 2003. The tailgate is rusted. The
paint is flaking off. There is a mountain of junk piled in the truck bed. I keep meaning to clean it out, but...
Maybe some other day.
Every night, my wife and I walk our dogs after supper. We eat early because we are getting middle-aged and we don’t sleep well if we eat late.
We walk the dirt road, then down the paved street toward Hewett Bayou, which is on the Choctawhatchee Bay. And though I can’t prove it, I believe ninety-nine percent of the frogs in the Southeastern United States are conceived in my backyard.
On our walks, we talk. Mainly, about what we would do if we ever had money. Then we laugh and realize that we will never have money because we are not money people.
You are either a money person or you aren’t. You can’t be both. You either love…