Thankful for the half glass

The front porch of our rental house in Augusta, Ga., is a great place to drink coffee and read the paper in the morning. (Photo: John Curry)

This week, the Cyberhomes bloggers will be sharing what we've been thankful for in 2009, a most difficult real estate year. Check back each day for a new Thanksgiving post and share your own thoughts on what you're thankful for this season.

Thanksgiving has a real half glass empty or full quality to it this year, with the answer depending totally on how I choose to view the situation. Last Thanksgiving, I never could have imagined that it would be the last one in our house. But three months later, both my husband and I were laid off from our respective jobs and we found ourselves off on a new adventure. If I just stopped there, it would just be a half-glass empty perspective. But that wouldn’t be honest.

Unlike so many of our friends who are out of work this year, we were extremely fortunate to get another job -- without even trying. The day before we got the news of my lay-off, my husband got a call about a job interview. His new job -- which pays more than his old one -- started before my severance ran out, and we never missed a day of health insurance. We’re so blessed, and so many of our friends are hurting, that we almost feel guilty about being employed.

The one heartbreak of this has been moving to a new city. We loved Athens, Ga., and had planned on spending the rest of our lives there. If you’d asked me for a list of 100 places I’d like to live, Augusta, Ga., wouldn’t have been on it. After having lived in South Florida for nearly 20 years and then in a college town, I was stunned by the blatant racism that plagues Augusta and keeps it perpetually tearing itself apart.

Yes, it’s the home of the most prestigious sporting event in the world, but Augusta National, where the Masters golf tournament is played, is as to Augusta as the Vatican is to Rome -- a place of great beauty, but essentially a separate country. There is crushing poverty less than two miles from those fabled azaleas, hidden away behind the tall, green fences that surround the golf course.

I could find plenty of reasons to hate the place. But if I did, I would miss out on the good, and the reasons to be thankful -- and they’re plentiful. We have a rental house here that more than meets our needs, a two-bedroom bungalow with a front porch and a picket fence that’s a seven-minute drive from my husband’s job. We can walk to the best burgers in town.  

On a much more basic level, we haven’t gone hungry this year and we haven’t paid any bills late. Our older daughter, who also lost her job in Athens, has come to live with us and to finish school at Augusta State University, which is five minutes from our house. That has greatly eased the ache we’d felt at being separated from her. Our younger daughter, who is a junior in college, will be here for Thanksgiving.

We’ve made new friends, joined a good church, started to get involved in the community, and just got our first party invitation. Fall has been glorious, and on the weekends when we’ve been out of town, I’ve found myself disappointed about what I was missing while we’ve been gone. Augusta definitely doesn’t feel like home yet, but it’s feeling less like exile than it did a few months ago.

Read the blog's previous Thanksgiving post.

Read the blog's next Thanksgiving blog post.