Nuts.

December 12, Ft Myers.

To me the face of the U.S. financial meltdown is that of Sherri.
Sherri is probably in her forties, still beautiful. I answered her online ad for used furniture and walked into the living story of the real estate meltdown and the economic disaster it has created.
Sherri and her husband started out with nothing twenty years ago, and ended up building a successful business, a cabinet-making business that kicked ass, as she said, during the boom of the real estate market in Florida. Then the crisis hit and they lost everything: their business went bankrupt, their home is in foreclosure, they are selling pretty much all they own and moving to Georgia where her husband found a lesser-paying job.
When we started out we had nothing, I used to wonder how I would pay for formula, she said, and now here we are and I have to think of how to pay for milk.
Day after day as I call to find this and that for the house I run into the same story, people living in motels while their home is being foreclosed, Dave in room 154 at the Wonderland Motel selling a new fridge, selling their belongings before the bank gets them, Chris at another motel selling a stove, that's all I've left in there. Sherri said there was a story in the news this morning about southwest Florida having the highest unemployment rate in the country. She's trying to keep her two teenage sons in school, waiting to be reunited with her husband, and it's like we're dating again, she said, laughing. We need a drastic change, she said, and Obama has so much on his plate, but he'll do something good, this is nuts.
I had called about her ceiling fans, white with no lights.
They'll keep my home nice and cool.
My home was a foreclosure.