Free The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life by Melanie Shankle Page B

husband, and I was at her house one time when a new couch got delivered. “Well, great,” he groaned. “Another hundred dollars out the door.”
    Sure.
    Because couches cost $100.
    If you buy them from someone’s garage.
    The thing is that in all the checking accounts and retirement accounts and grown-up responsible financial things, Perry and I have made a commitment to honor God first. We try our best to remember that all things come from him and belong to him. And he has never failed to provide for us even when conventional Mr. Drysdale wisdom would say it doesn’t make sense.
    I’ll never forget the look on my dad’s face several years ago when I announced that Perry and I decided I should resign from my job and pursue writing full time. It was like we’d just declaredthat we believed fairies would henceforth be delivering bags of money to our doorstep, and I just knew my dad was envisioning a future where he would have to let us live on his front lawn in tents that he purchased. But Perry and I knew it was a step of faith that God was calling us to take, so we   —very prayerfully and soberly and freaking-outerly   —walked out on a precarious financial ledge.
    It was one of the hardest years of our marriage. Perry had to have surgery, and we had bad insurance, my car got broken into, and a band of gypsies depleted our savings account. (Not really, but that sounds more fun than telling you how we had to get our roof fixed.) It wasn’t fun times.
    But we saw God provide what we needed time and time again. It was Proverbs 30:8 in action: he gave us neither poverty nor riches. And the upside of only getting your daily bread is it eliminates a lot of arguments about whether or not you need to get new kitchen countertops, because you don’t think much about those things when you’re busy buying five boxes of Hamburger Helper because they’re on sale for fifty-nine cents each and you’ve forgotten that you think Hamburger Helper is gross.
    And ultimately it’s these times that can make or break a marriage. You can let it tear you down and make you bitter over other people who appear to have more, or you can band together and realize it’s just money. It comes and goes, but never once has it bought anyone real, lasting happiness.
    A fact that Perry and I have reminded each other of repeatedly over the years during lean times as we toast each other with a glass of wine poured from a $2 bottle right before we dig into our Hamburger Helper stroganoff.

CHAPTER 8
    Home Improvement
    O VER THE YEARS, Perry and I have attempted various home projects, because while I normally tend to be more of the “let’s hire someone to do that” mentality, Perry is more of an “if you build it, they will come” guy. (Why am I referencing Field of Dreams in relation to home improvements? I don’t know. It just seemed to fit.)
    But I’ve always contended there is nothing that will test a marriage like a project. It doesn’t matter what it is, because when you put the male mind and the female mind together in one effort, there is bound to be some disagreement on how things should be done.
    One of the things we love about our house is the back house. It’s basically a wooden structure, similar to a garage, located in back of our house. Hence the name: back house.
    It is a building with dual identities, much like Clark Kent, thatencompasses the finest features of both garage and dwelling. The garage section is just a one-car garage with a door that slides open, and when you pull in, there is another set of doors at the back of the garage that access a shed-type area. The doors are there because our house was built when the majority of people still drove horse-drawn buggies. The original owners could pull their buggy into an enclosed garage area and tie their horse in the shed. Charles Ingalls never had it so good. This should also be an indicator of the back house’s condition. It has seen better days. Namely, the1920s.
    The