Spring had arrived, time for my family’s annual vacation, a week on the Chesapeake Bay property we owned 40 miles from Washington, D.C.. It was nothing fancy, just two double-wide trailer homes that were in constant need of repair. But we always had great fun, fishing, crabbing, water skiing, just lolling around. This year though, I worried. We really couldn’t afford it.
Money at home was tight. Had been tight since February, when I was laid off from my job as regional sales manager for an electrical construction company. My wife, Beth, and I have two daughters in college and a son in high school who’s expecting to go to college too. Somehow I had to support them all.
Still, I was determined not to let on how dire our situation was. “We’re going,” I told everyone. Somehow, I’ll scrape up the $175 or so in gas and groceries it will cost, I thought.
When we arrived, we found the trailer homes as beaten down as the economy. An army of field mice had invaded every room. I set out mouse traps. We’d brought along our pet cat, and she set to work too. We tried to ignore our uninvited houseguests as best we could.
By our last day, I thought I’d put the mice out of my mind. Till I opened a drawer in an old bureau, hoping to find a pair of clean socks for the drive home. I found socks all right – chewed and torn and rearranged into a nest for a family of baby mice.
That was the last straw. The final indignity. How much further can my life tumble? I thought. I carried the drawer outside and reintroduced the mice to the wild. Then I went to dump my ruined socks in the trash. As I spilled the contents from the drawer, the drawer liner came loose – a liner that had been there since Beth had purchased the bureau at a yard sale, 17 years before.
Beneath the liner was a sealed bank envelope. On it, someone had written, “Have a Happy Day!”
I opened it. Inside was $190 in crisp bills. The cost of our vacation.
