As someone once said to me “it doesn’t matter where you start, you’ll always get to where you need.”

So, here goes!

Some years ago ,I fled to my mother’s, who still lived in the village where I grew up, to put some space between the man I loved and myself. We needed some distance to lick our wounds and give ourselves time to see whether we had a future.
I ended up with a job and a mortgage and have stayed without ever really making a choice to stay.  Continual illness and large chunks of time off work  meant I have lived in constant anxiety about not being able to keep up the mortgage payments and becoming homeless.

.. It’s a long story. Eventually I sold my house, left my job and  bought this house with one of my friends- a large house in a small, country town. The main street still has a shop (more a shed), for irrigation things and the rural supplies shop has hay bales and farm bits in the window. Window display is clearly not a selling point. I hear cows mooing at night. There’s a sheep in the backyard a few houses along.

Six months after moving into this house, I’m still living in chaos. Boxes line the hall, books are stacked downstairs and I spend too much time searching for a piece of paper I had five minutes ago.

My friend has never lived in the country and she prefers inner-city; she is truly an urban dweller as was I.  But we are mortgage free! And we have some space where we can grow vegies, live a simpler life, put solar panels on the roof and contribute to our community.

Renting in Sydney, I couldn’t see how I could ever buy. I feared being a bag lady. Buying with a friend has risks. It’s a challenge. But it means I don’t always have to put out the garbage. If one of us is ill, we have someone to drive us to the doctor, make the chicken soup…And, we are sharing resources rather than  gobbling up so many of the earth’s resources.  A couple of times I’ve thought I might have been getting sick- my first thought? It didn’t matter. I don’t have a mortgage. My friend and I are two of the lucky ones. We can only give it a go!