Last night I was working on my seed catalog order while my husband watched the news. I was writing out locations for each little crop when a teaser for the next segment came up talking about how the mortgage crisis wasn’t even half over, and that there was a new wave of mortgages that they had never heard of that were about to hit.

Well, I had heard of them. Why the heck was 60 Minutes (linke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shYJ_KkbzWg&NR=1 )trying to say they hadn’t heard of the Alt-As? I’d known about them, maybe because we lived in Florida during the massive frenzy and I had seen all the ads. No money down, 3% teaser rates for three years… I had a friend go for one, getting himself a half-million dollar home while he was self-employed and the company wasn’t making any money. Another was what they called “NINJA” loans - no Income, No job, No assets - but they’d loan out the money anyway. No-doc loans - meaning you didn’t have to prove anything. I could have borrowed $100,000 on my little business, and never shown a single tax statement from the past few years.

For some reason, I had mentally put these loans in the same category as the sub-primes. Knowing the Alt-A’s teaser rates were probably coming due starting a year ago (as my friend bought his home four years ago), I thought some of these were already coming due and were part of the same crisis.

Apparently not so. And, the largest wave of these is expected to hit in 2012.

So much for a short-term crisis with a recovery in 6 months to a year, folks.

Not that I really had much hope for that. I really didn’t - I’ve been trying to brace for a depression for a few years now, but sometimes, hearing how someone thinks it will be a year helps to raise hopes a little bit. For myself, my gut instinct says we are in for the next 6 years, and recovery will be slow.

This is scary. Really scary. I have too many friends that are already hurting, people whose spouses have lost their jobs, friends who are not counted in the nation’s unemployment rate because they lost their job 6 months ago. Friends who fight about money constantly. And one friend whose 4-year-old son asked if he could get a job to help his dad make money. The same child offered up $1 of his allowance to help the family have fun on vacation. “Talk about making a grown man cry,” he told me.

I’m not saying all of this to be depressing. I do my best not to get down about the economy because there’s only so many things I can do: I can take care of myself and mine, and help whomever I can along the way. To that end, nearly half of my backyard is being turned to vegetable and herb gardens. I’m saving seeds from fruits and vegetables we buy, and I and working that clay all winter - adding everything I can to it - to make the best possible crop of veggies I can out there this spring and summer.

When I was a kid, my mother often made my clothes. Most of the dresses I wore to school were handmade. I liked this, until other students at this private school (who were probably jealous and whose parents probably both worked) said I must be poor, to have my mom making my clothes. I’m sure hearing this hurt my mom’s feelings, but she did still make some of my playclothes. I had a favorite, lemon-yellow shirt that she had copied off of another shirt that we had bought - she made it a size larger, so I could wear it longer. It wasn’t that my parents couldn’t afford to buy clothes - sewing was mom’s hobby as much as it is mine now (probably more). But it’s also a wonderful skill to have, especially in difficult financial times. Clothes now are often so cheap it’s easily worth it to go to a yard sale to get what you need - the hard part is, a lot of times those clothes originally came from Wal-mart or Target and fall apart after a wash or two. The old vintage stuff is the best - tried and true. I still wear one of my husband’s flannel shirts from when he was a kid - it survives, year after year, wash after wash.

Still, it’s good to be able to stitch together your better clothes. The coats and pants and party dresses. It’s also great to be able to make the accessories for your home. I made our curtains - all of them. I’ve made tablecloths and runners, napkins and placemats, bags and purses that never go out of style because they never ARE in style to begin with. And I never throw scraps away - there are nearly always things you can do, even with those pieces. If you can’t sew, learn. Now. Learn a new skill - knitting or cooking or gardening or something - anything - that might help you in the lean times ahead.

Hang on to every dollar you make now, folks. You may need every penny pretty soon.

Everybody’s talking about Wall Street.  Every morning we all read the news to find out what bank collapsed today, check on our IRAs, 401Ks and our stocks to see what kind of money we have lost now.

I feel terrible for all the people who have lost lots and lots of money lately. All the good, hard working Americans who have been dutifully giving half their paycheck to their 401K or IRA, only to be watching that money disappear now. Many of them were probably about ready to retire. We heard about all the folks after Enron collapsed and felt for them - this is bigger than Enron. Heartbreaking.

More sad are all the people who have been foreclosed on, or who have had to walk out of their homes and hand the bank the keys because they couldn’t make those payments after the rates increased on them. For many in Florida, it wasn’t just that their mortgage payments doubled, but so did the cost of insurance, electricity, gasoline and taxes. A person can only take so much.

Even my little neighborhood in my little town has seen foreclosures. One was a lovely family that was struggling after their third child was born. Now they’ve moved in with her mother, the house sits empty, and the grass is two feet tall - this is hard to see after knowing how he always worked to keep that yard so neat and tidy. I miss seeing the kids playing in the backyard, and the mom sitting on the swing on the back porch, watching them play. You don’t often see children playing outside anymore, or a parent willing to watch them. It’s just really sad.

Which brings me back to my topic. What’s all this running around for, anyway? We in this culture work hard in school so we can get a good job, where we again work hard so we get noticed by the boss and get a good raise so we can afford a big house and a nice car and all the trappings and start a savings plan and put money away so we can retire and finally enjoy life. We are barely ever home with our kids, we are barely home to enjoy the homes we work so hard to pay for. And we eat processed crap because there is no time to make a real meal. We’re tired all the time, we take Ambien to make us go to sleep and drink a quart of coffee to wake us up.

Who designed this treadmill?

A friend and I were out riding our bicycles and I was talking about how I am taking a break from doing jobs I don’t love but that pay well and instead doing things I like and being a little broke, but happy. I said I felt like life was too short to run around and work my ass off instead of enjoying life. Don’t get me wrong - I’m definitely working my ass off between four jobs, managing a garden, cooking meals, keeping house, hanging laundry on the line, making as much as I can around the house and processing food for winter. But I love it. I really do. My rewards are many - I love, love being at home. It’s all these little intangible things, like seeing how the sun enters my kitchen in the Fall, something I’d never seen before. And other things too - like the self-reliance thing I talked about a few posts ago. I don’t feel dependent on consumerism to make things work at home, I can make them.

Back to the bike ride, my friend says, you know, it took her until she was 50 to realize that she would never be a millionaire, would never have a maid to clean her home, and that life was slipping away from her. Part of the influence in her realization was her parents. They worked until they were in their 70s, planning on doing lots of traveling when they retired. They retired and… they were too old to travel anymore. All that work and saving, for what?

Which is probably what a lot of people who are sadly watching their portfolios shrink are asking too.

I’m not saying “live for today and spend all your money” - but I do think we should live a little bit, each day. I’ve realized now that I know how much I love making fresh dinners and growing my garden and fitting in that bike ride a few times a week, I just can’t get a full time job. I would die inside from knowing what I am missing.

This treadmill that our culture has created over the past 70 years - getting us off the farm or out of small towns where the cobbler fixed shoes or the baker made bread - and instead making us work for faceless companies that barely know our names and could outsource our jobs to India or China at a moment’s notice - is empty. Is this what life should be? Working our lives away and being so dependent on buying our clothes, our pre-made food (ick?), big houses, nice cars, and having to watch our paychecks go right out the door for a mortgage, a car (or two), daycare (because we have to work), lawn maintenance (because again, we have to work), a housekeeper (because we can’t work full time AND do the deep-cleaning)… is this really living?

Maybe this setback in the economy is a chance for us to re-evaluate what is important to us. Maybe we don’t need a big house. Maybe we don’t need the Hummer. If we downsize, maybe we can afford a small home and not have any payments in a few years. Maybe both parents only need to work part-time, and can spend time with the kids, enjoy the yard we mow, take walks or ride our bicycles to the store or the post office. Maybe we could help our teachers, or get involved in an aspect of the community, plant gardens or take up hobbies and sell our creations online. Maybe we don’t have to hate Monday morning anymore.

If we think about it, maybe it can be done. Maybe we can have our cake and eat it too.