Mara stunned me this morning. She told me that she had sent a list of trucking companies for me to call. She's apparently decided to go back to driving. She told me last night that if were to ask her to go back to driving, she would be willing to do it. But she's said similar things before. I didn't give it much thought, assuming that she meant it only in a theoretical sense (because I would never ask her to do that). Apparently she meant it.

Her reasoning is that we are in bad financial straights here. A lot of that has to do with me. I haven't tried very hard to find work. If I had come straight home from U.S. Xpress and immediately jumped into another truck, driving for another company, we would not be in the mess we're in. Well, that's not entirely true. We were in a mess when I came home. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that if I had done that, Mara would not have considered driving again.

She did add some caveats which I totally agree with. We must be home every night or at least every weekened. No more of this six weeks out stuff. I couldn't bear to go back to that, anyway. But as I told her, we once had a general plan. We intended to fix up the house, get new appliances, and generally get things in order before we came home from driving for good. Her surgery and decision to stop driving pretty much put an end to that. If we set a timetable and make a plan and stick to it, what didn't happen by the end of this year can definitely happen by the end of next year.

It remains to be seen if Mara thinks better of all this. As much as I'd like to be able to report that this is a beam of hope cutting through the darkness, I'm not too sure I want to do this myself. But however it plays out, we desperately need money. This is a quick and easy fix. We don't expect to get rich driving, but we can certainly expect at least decent paychecks. Far removed from U.S. Xpress' anti-driver policies, we might do quite well.

Our basic problem is that we stopped right in the middle of everything this year. All of our plans were just dropped. We still have work to do on the house. We still have plumbing problems. We still have electrical problems. We still need new applicances. None of these things can be done working locally. The money's not there. It's that simple.

So ...

One more year. If we drive, it's for one more year. Please, God, let if be for only one more year.