I live in the upper Midwest, while Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath rages in the southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. We couldn’t be farther apart. At least geographically.
But before this is over, I believer that, regardless of where Americans live, we will all feel an aftershock from the ruin and devastation that has hit our country. We may still have our homes, but our wallets will be affected at the gasoline pump, the grocery store, and the mall. That’s because so many products are a creation of oil, and our oil production has been reduced by ten percent almost overnight.
This finds Earl and me making a list of things where we could economize. For starters, we could gang errands since we live in a community with no public transportation. We could use my car, a modest stick shift, over his, an SUV. We could wash our own clothes, instead of sending them out. We could even hose down our own cars.
Over the past few years, we’ve taken to having everything done for us: lawnmowing, house cleaning, gutter clearing, you name it. It’s not that we’re lazy; we’ve just subscribed to the theory that it’s cheaper to hire work done if you make more per hour than you pay the subcontractor. But now, with the devastation of New Orleans, things are going to get dicey . . . and more expensive.
So I think this is a good time to ride the pricey bikes that sit in our garage, to kayak on the river like we’ve said we always wanted, to do our own weeding (Yes, weeding). It’s also time to read those books we’ve bought on a whim, to review the upcoming television season, and to generally hunker down while the world out there sorts things out.
With this in mind, I see 2006 as the year of economizing, of enjoying what we have while not acquiring more, and a year to give thanks that we don’t live in a place that Hurricane Katrina can level.
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