Megan and I were coming home from an evening at Spyhouse (me desperately writing a paper for a conference, a sad excuse for a paper; Megan reading) and caught the end of The Story on our glorious Minnesota Public Radio. This is what it was about:

Jessica Zichichi and her husband Sal have held onto good jobs – their problem is the housing market.

Jess and Sal were living in a small house in Cape Cod that they loved. Then Sal took a job in South Carolina. It was 2006 and they figured they could easily sell the house. In the meantime, they’d live on their 33-foot boat.

Then the bottom fell out of the housing market. Jess and Sal were stuck living on the boat while they rented their house to a nightmare tenant and tried to rustle up enough funds to build a one-room barn to live in. And then Jess got pregnant. She talks with Dick about some of the good that’s come from her family’s ordeal.

With all the awfulness of our own buying(?) a short sale ordeal overwhelming most aspects of our lives at the moment, hearing Jess’s story was like a moment of light. I think this may have been a rerun because I vaguely remember the story, and I remember originally thinking “oh how terrible!!” – but this time it just delighted us. We laughed and gave each other big smiles every time Jess’s story intersected with ours. Just knowing someone else was going through things as ridiculous as ours – and more so, at least we’re not living on a boat, right? – made our transient life a little less lonely and tragic.

It’s not perspective really, more of a relief at shared troubles. I guess that’s perspective in a way.

All I know is that MPR brings me so much joy so frequently. And I love listening to it with Megan.

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By the way, I haven’t even talked about how we got married. But it was so fantastic. I’ve started a few posts about it, but things have been so nuts with the house stuff that I haven’t even had the level of concentration necessary to finish writing the posts and do the wedding justice.