My amazing friends

With the passing of Rob's grandmother, we were scrambling to figure out, well honestly, how we were going to get him there. We had just bought 4 plane tickets for Nova Scotia for us for June, and for anyone who has travelled knows, buying a plane ticket to fly the next day is brutally expensive. Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I stress over money, even if there is more than enough to go around I will still worry about running out. I check our bank account more times than is really necessary, just to make sure I know exactly what is in there at all times. (This I believe comes from when we lived well beyond our means earlier in our lives, being naiive about credit and budgets). Yes, a little more information than I should probably share, but really, who hasn't maxed out a credit card (or two, or three...) at some point in their lives? Anyway..... since moving to the North and not having a mortgage, we have been super smart about our finances, and because of our living situation we have been able to clear off more debt in the 4 years we have been here than honestly I thought possible. We live quite frugally to do this and it is paying off. We now save to buy the things we want, and with some great finds have been able to buy some of the things we normally would never have been able to($300.00 for a skidoo, really who WOULDN'T pass that up??). Frugal is one thing, but we (ahem *I*) have also learned that you have to also enjoy life. With this being said, when Rob got his call that his grandmother had passed, we both knew that I would somehow find the available funds to buy that ticket. I vented to a close friend of mine about this, and joked with her "Don't suppose you have an extra $1100.00 laying around, do ya?". She called me an hour later at work, telling me that it wasn't much, but her and her husband were able to scrape together $600.00 if we wanted to borrow it. I bawled. Here is a family who are living day to day, but willing to give us all the savings and available cash they have right now (they are saving for an out of town medical trip, and yes they are Metis, having lived in this community their entire lives). I really have amazing friends in this community, and now more than ever I feel like we belong. We have never been made to feel like the "white people" in town, and when people ask me what it is like to live in an aboriginal community, I tell them it's like we've always lived here.