I sat staring deep into the flames, listening to voices stirring the wind around me. Soft footfalls pressed through the grass stalks, rustling gently. Though I couldn't see them, I knew they were ... [+]
When my kids were little, back in the late 1980s, we bought our new house and took on a bigger mortgage. I was a stay-at-home mom. After moving in, my husband John got permanently laid off from his job at the defense plant. He was devastated. After recovering from the shock, he came to me, wondering if I would embrace the idea of him starting his own welding business. He was fed up with the big corporations. He had been a shipyard welder for a decade, enduring multiple layoffs, then spent five years at the aerospace plant. The plant gave John a severance package, and then he would be on unem