Perspective.

When I was in 2nd grade, we lived for a whole year in a pop-up trailer. My parents were building our house (like, literally building, with their own hands and hammers) and, because our previous home had to be sold in order to purchase materials for the new house, we had to live somewhere cheap.

And you don’t get much cheaper than a pop-up trailer. We showered down the road at my grandparents’house (where the shower was in the laundry room and was home to more slugs than one could ever imagine—oh, the heebie jeebies!) and our running water at the pop-up? Came from a hose.

My parents slept in one end of the trailer and my sister and I in the other. Our sleeping bags were zippered together, her Care Bears on one side, my My Little Pony on the other. After a year of sleeping like this, both sleeping bags had holes worn on the inside from where our feet rubbed at night. Proof positive one isn’t meant to spend every night in a sleeping bag from Wal-Mart.

We played outside, driving nails into spare pieces of wood and fishing in the pond in the pasture behind our home and riding our bikes up and down the blacktop road until we couldn’t see our shadows anymore.

One night the wind blew very long and very hard and the pop-up shook and shook until it seemed we were about to Dorothy our way straight to Oz. So, we moved into the unfinished house and didn’t spend any more nights in a pop-up trailer in the middle of a pasture.

Sometimes when I’m feeling self-pitying and thinking about how my circumstances are standing the way of my happiness, I try to remember what it was like being the little girl who got off the bus while all the other kids watched and walked up the pop-up trailer where she lived.

Things are never so hard as I imagine. I am most blessed.