Obviously if one lives from paycheck to paycheck -- or in my case from SSI automatic deposit to SSI automatic deposit -- one must plot and plan. One’s money comes monthly on Wednesday in the week in which one’s birthday falls. Day after tomorrow in this case. I have a very tight budget -- in fact, I come out about $50 short every month, a gap I fill by borrowing or selling something or just doing without something. Some strange menus towards the end of the month, more complicated by eating for diabetes 2.
I rarely put off a bill, but there are some entities (like the power company) that systematically bill out-of-sequence with everyone else, so they tend to not show earlier payments and I can easily overpay by mistake or not reserve enough money to pay them. In fact, AT&T has been billing me about fifty bucks a month for a service I never use -- long-distance -- because I use calling cards. My phone company, when I called them -- since AT&T is invisible -- said that at one time I “froze” them into my billing and that at that time my phone company, a co-op, was prevented by law from providing long distance. In short, by changing laws and regulations on a level opaque to observers, they’ve been cheating me out of $50 a month. I shut them down and the “helper” said she sure wondered why I hadn’t done it sooner. (A common remark around here is, "Well, I thought that was pretty stupid but I didn't want to say anything."
Aside from paranoia, let’s look at practicalities. On Friday, reasoning that most people would be shopping, I went to Shelby to do my wash at the laundromat. There are three county seats with laundromats, each about thirty miles from Valier which had a laundromat itself when I moved here but closed it down because it was “too much trouble.” Anyway, we’ve got a huge water shortage. Shelby is where I usually go. The change machine had no quarters. No one in town was willing to give me quarters. The change machine at the car wash had no quarters.
I thought I’d risk driving over to Cut Bank, where the laundromat is attended, even though the machines cost $3 instead of $2.50 (They are newer front-loaders and actually do a better job.). I always used to do my wash there until I acquired a religious stalker who thinks we have some kind of relationship. When he sees my pickiup, he shows up to harangue me. The attendant hesitates to throw him out because his father is rich. The pitiable man is human detritis from a miserable marriage, not unusual in these small-and-getting-smaller former boom towns. Cut Bank is what’s left of a major oil strike. Anyway, the laundromat was closed. I had driven a 75 mile triangle for nothing, except that I had enough money to get my December meds. Not enough to pick up groceries at the same time.
So today, Monday, I took stock. The forecast was 40 degrees and breezy. That meant I could get by with no quarters for the dryers, so off I went with my fingers crossed that the change machine would be reloaded. It was! But the temp was 14 and it has remained 14. I didn’t have enough cash to get enough quarters to dry everything. I could have gone to a store to buy something and asked for quarters in my change, but I thought that since things dry, machine or no machine, I’d just take some of the wash home wet. Anyway, if I wrote a check for $10, it might be enough to trigger a $25 overdraft charge because Netflix bills by automatic deduction (the ONLY one I allow) at unpredictable times and that could throw me into overdraft. $25 is a horrendous expense in a budget as tight as mine. But I need to call my money co-op Credit Union -- I thought I had automatic overdraft protection because of being a senior citizen.
Actually, I’d have had enough gas if I hadn’t had to drive so far on Friday, but I had to put more gas in for this run and my gas card doesn’t work in Valier so I had to write a check. Exxon has closed out all its small stations and only supplies the big truck stops and casino-related food stores. The small stations are co-ops now and maybe I ought to get a gas card with this one. If I were still in the ministry and had to travel on an emergency basis, I would.
Now a lot of fleece shirts are hanging in my front room -- it’s not a hardship. And my dryer, another remainder of the former tenant here, discarded because it was too old and busted to sell, is finishing off the small stuff -- socks and underwear. It never gets quite hot and the timer is kaput, so I have to set the kitchen timer, but it works. Sorta.
I should run a clothesline in my garage. Actually clothes on the outside line should dry, since the air is so dry that moisture sublimates before it gets warm enough to melt first. The wet clothes were frozen by the time I got home. I think I’ll put the sweats out there. I’ll resort to another ploy: ironing the lightweight clothes. I had enough quarters to dry the sheets.
Sylvia, the cousin who found me, sent me her grandmother’s journal from homesteading in Oklahoma before 1900. It is earlier than my grandparents in South Dakota, and since it was newly opened Indian territory (alas!) there was no infrastructure. They end in dugouts, tents, and a little house on wheels pulled by mules. They are rained out, flooded out, droughted out, baked and frozen, and more than a few died, sometimes beloved and indispensable people. A crook stole their mule and the courts were so clogged that though they went to testify repeatedly, delays kept justice from being done. These were religious people, and that helped.
Who am I to complain? It’s clearly up to me to figure out how to cope at least as well as they did. After all, I have a big heap of shirts, they had maybe two each -- one to wear and one to wash by hand. None of them fleece.
I got out an issue of Mother Earth and found a old-fashioned unautomated but motor-powered wringer-washer like the one my mother used to do my diapers. It costs almost $1,000. An ordinary Sears washing machine costs only maybe $300 with monthly payments about equal to the quarters I need at the laundromat. The catch is that it would cost nearly another $300 to install it! IF I could get the attention of a plumber. That may be easier as the housing boom dies down, except that it has not here. Lots of rich people moving in, thinking they will be safe.
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