Beginnings

I am sitting in a folding chair, cheap paper plate dappled
with prescriptions, writing on a $400 laptop connected 
to a hotspot, watching the timer as megabytes run out. 
Whether we need to add to the account is up to someone 
else, dependent on a lawyer, senator, financier, someone 
more powerful whose name we don’t even know. Not from 
lack of effort, mind you. That kind of information just isn’t 
available to people who—even if temporarily—have no place.  
And it makes sense that more consistently, I find myself thinking 

of the man in the park, of the loop where we walk our dog, and 
evenings where months ago, I told my husband I did not feel right 
discussing buying a home while someone right in front of us is
living out of a car. He seems to spend the currency of day
staring at the floor of a pavilion, refusing to look up. When  
rented by some party or another, of course, “our guy,” as we call   
him, isn’t there, probably having moved to another site. And  
if am truthful with me, it’s a relief not to see him, was a massive  
exhale one morning a young ranger spoke to him, no eviction 
apparently in mind, and another day, someone else had courage 
to bring him a bag of food. Because how can we, in any sort of
conscience, talk about buying something comfortable while 
he is sitting right there? And yes, I do know what it is like 

not to really have an address, not just now that we are  
between houses in a weird real estate limbo, neither settled   
in old or new, dependent on the kindness of credit, family,  
friends, and strangers. Years ago, when I was pregnant with  
my first, down on my luck in an unknown, small farm town 
brimming with farmland, Angus, and decisions I didn’t know  
I was making, the attic apartment fell through, the only car  
caught fire, reporters came out, and it hit the front pages.
Even McDonald's wouldn’t hire me, because who wants to  
take a risk on a big bellied woman with no transportation,
water ready to break? It was then that the only known local 

gay man paired with a working poor Catholic family of five,
fourth-hand furniture and a picture of the pope on their wall, 
tucked us under white, protective wings, and my baby had 
a safe place to be born. But I remember what it felt like not 
to have much of anything my own, to be in a strange town 
where no one else would look at me, where beef cattle and  
calves moaned so deeply, it bounced off the hills as they made  
their slow way through the hours, naming the fear: No one
really gets to choose beginnings. They just kind of happen.  

Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, copyright June 5, 2024, all rights reserved