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Bad Weather

by Christian Huebner 

“The economy” is a wonderfully vague word.  It sounds tame, sterile, scientific.  We use it all the time, with unquestioned confidence that we know what it means.  We speak about it like an animal (“the economy is slowing down”), like a body of water (“the economy is drying up”), like a machine (“the economy is grinding to a halt”), or like a piece of matter in a laboratory (“the economy is contracting”).

But in reality, the economy is more like the weather.  We know it’s not a “thing”; it’s a state.  In the case of the economy, it’s the state of how we tend to give and receive things from each other.  But we talk about it like a thing – something awesome or dangerous or befuddling – because, just like the weather, when the state changes, we feel the effects so profoundly.

My own family is a perfect example of the kinds of effects the latest change of economic clime, especially on young people.  In my clan, all three of my little sisters and I are at the precipice of adulthood, and each of us are now doing the sorts of things you have to do when the weather turns bad.

First of all, you postpone your plans.  Last week, my littlest sister and I speculated about when she would get engaged to and marry her boyfriend.  She’s a senior in college, finishing her last semester of student teaching while she looks for a school district – any school district – that has the money to hire an up-and-coming history teacher and soccer coach.  He’s a recent graduate in finance, who dug for months and months to find the best job he could: 40 hours a week for $11/hour plus benefits.  He’ll sell back their prized World Cup tickets to buy a ring.  Late summer dates, penciled in at Christmas, have been pushed into October, on the theory that a hypothetical teaching job would have fall break around then.

When the weather gets bad, you bide your time by doing something useful until conditions improve.  My parents are fond of the maxim, “if you can’t earn, learn!”  My middle sister is taking their advice.  After graduating from college last spring, she enrolled in more classes over the summer to get prerequisites and prepare for optometry school.  Now she’s working at a family friend’s eye clinic and waiting for the fall when she can enter the safe harbor of the academy for the next four years.

Finally, when the weather is nasty, you stay in and hunker down with the ones you know.  My oldest little sister is married, in her final semester of law school, and dealing with the frustration of having talent and work ethic in spades with nowhere to use it.  She and her husband moved out of their cute little apartment by the law school and into my parents’ basement, to get cheaper rent and economies of scale in food.  They plan to move to Texas in the summer and look for jobs there.  If there are none to be had at first, they’ll move in with my brother-in-law’s parents, until they can afford to live out on their own again.

It isn’t all bad, though, this postponing and redirecting and hunkering in.  Sometimes bad weather is the coziest.

This Christmas, I made it back to my parents’ house just before Nebraska was smothered by a three-day blizzard.  We were all there: my parents, my sisters, my current and future brothers-in-law – even my grandpa had flown in from Arizona.  On Christmas Eve we barely made it back from church; on Christmas morning the interstate was closed, and we had to scrap our annual trip across the Missouri River to my grandmother’s house in Iowa.

But it was a wonderful day.  Mom got pots of soup cooking on the range, the men went out to attack the driveway with shovels, and my sisters organized a daylong board game competition.  Hard times had forced my parents to move that year as well, into a house that was one quarter the size of their previous place.  Nine adults wrapped in sweaters and down blankets, three cats, one dog, and one Christmas tree, filled the living room that day.  Together, we rode out the storm.

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)