I'm a Realtor now Mom!

However long ago twenty was for her, that's how long her career in real estate has been delayed. She won't pretend it was just yesterday, in fact more than three decades have flown by, in what seemed to be the blink of the all seeing eye. When she was a numbskulled twenty-nothing her ma thought she should join Mom's stable of realtors in suburban New Jersey and use Mama's charm and influence to skyrocket her way to wealth as one of the home office's agents. Being not only a numbskull, but a defiant one at that, she chose to cast that opportunity away in favor of romance and of adventure. She did go to school and get her real estate license, but that's as far as she went with that offer of earthly empire.
She wanted to live back to the land, the free and freaky life of the seventies hippie and nothing more. Communes, tipis, schoolbusses, yurts you name it and she found it and she lived it. Two and a half decades of her life were dedicated to seeking the most difficult, the most self-deprived and the most challenging situations she could possibly engage in personally and still survive, and then surviving them. Did she learn anything along the way? Of course. Life is not always easy, but there are ways to make it harder, if you want to.
Having gotten through all of her wandering and sometimes wonderful years has provided her with a unique perspective which she applies to everyday living. She calls it faith, tempered with a vast array of human experience. Skills, practical and old fashioned became the measure of a person's worth in her world. Patience and not money was often the coin of the realm as she waited and watched and learned all she could about lifestyles so different than the typical suburban norm.
Even now, patience is her guiding star, seeking what is good and what is sustainable, rather than the easy gratification of the moment. As a realtor, this patience and search for true value shapes her decisions, and she shares her experience of life through her daily transactions. And although her Mom has been gone for a few years, she knows Ma would be proud that after all these years she can finally say, "I'm a realtor now Mom!"