The problem is lot rent. Unless you live in a mobile home park, you probably don’t realize that you can own a home but not the land it’s on. Everyone who lives in Shady Forest Estates (which has neither shade nor a forest) is walking a financial tightrope, living on a fixed income or minimum wage. Lot rents have been increasing, which poses a difficulty unless your house can levitate. Mine have been able to do so in the past but it’s not an option for everyone, like my neighbors, Pat and Emma, who come for coffee every other day.

I appreciate the familiarity, how they hug me, kiss both cheeks, and bring some form of baked good. They’ve lived in Shady Forest for twenty years, since Pat became a widow, Emma got divorced, and the sisters bought a trailer together. Pat worked in an elementary school cafeteria for years and decorates cakes to order. Emma works three days a week at the fabric store and doesn’t know how long she can keep it up with the arthritis in her knees, but now she and Pat are fretting over the two newest families in the park. 

“They have troubles,” says Pat. “Financial troubles.” She, Emma, and I have taken a liking to the children who we see playing in the front yards. Shady Forest isn’t bad— we have summer picnics, a Halloween haunted pasture, and too many holiday decorations, but the park was purchased a few years ago by a new company. That’s when the problems started, you understand, now that our landlords are faceless entities who consider us only as rent checks.

I don’t explain the jars of herbs in my kitchen, but folks have learned that I know everything their grandmas did and a pinch more. I tell everyone that I’m from Oregon— mostly true since I moved there years ago and found a secluded glen where I could perch my cottage. I came to Shady Forest since I needed a place that was more peopled, a place where I could find new heroes. 

Sometimes I miss the old days and my fence of shining bones graced with the skulls that welcomed me home. Too many brash young people visited my forest cottage, and some of their heads were destined to decorate my abode. My heroes were more fleeting. I never saw them after they completed their mission to save their beloved from a giant, or steal their sibling’s heart back from some other witch. I was fine with fleeting relationships, assumed their happily-ever-after and waited for the next worthy person to emerge from the forest, requiring a magical knife or comb or doll.

Now my heroes have smaller but more persistent needs. They are older women who want tea, a chat, and a knowing nod. The dark-haired maidens have become grandmothers, their salt-and-pepper tresses bound in a kerchief, women who worry over grown children, fret over grandkids they are raising, or ache quietly for spouses who have passed on. They don’t believe in therapists. They believe in tea. Tea doesn't purport to fix anything, but sometimes it does. 

Four afternoons a week I work at the Adult Education Center as a GED tutor. Most of the tutors are older folks, retired teachers. Our students are in their twenties and sometimes their thirties, balancing jobs, children, and silver-edged dreams. 

“I’ve been snippy at home,” Lydia admits. “Have to drop the kids at Mom’s place for a bit so I can breathe and have study time.” After work she’s bleary-eyed and frazzled, makes dinner then drives here to cram a mountain of figures into her mind. Like most of my neighbors she lurches from paycheck to paycheck. Sometimes we work until the yawning hours of the night, but it’s easier to occupy myself here rather than wonder what to do when the moon is full and I recall old hungers.

You might be curious how I control those urges, but children are no longer a strong culinary temptation. There are times, however, when I hear them argue or tease each other outside my cottage and I feel a certain twinge. My role as she-who-is-to-be-feared is rather ingrained, even when I think I have abandon such habits.

When Emma cares for her grandchildren on the weekend, Pat visits me to lament. You can imagine that sisters always have an opinion on each other’s doings. 

“She’s a sweetheart and a softy,” says Pat. “Emma gives her daughter whatever extra money she has after groceries and rent, then she's babysitting. Doesn’t have a life of her own.” 

“It’s what she thinks a grandma should do,” I say. “Do you think she doesn't want to help her daughter as much as she does?”

“She wants to do it, and then complains to me,” says Pat. “Why can't Sonia save more money? Why can't she get a babysitter? Then she drives back over there the next weekend.”

This is the hero’s paradox— the need to feel needed, and simultaneous resentment. I don't know if those valiant grandmas would know what do with themselves if not sacrifice. They were taught to shape their lives around helping others.

“If I go out with friends, I wonder what my grandkids are doing,” says Emma. “I figure Sonia found an inexperienced babysitter and she’s feeding my grandbabies junk.” Heroic grandmas don’t know anything but the hero’s quest, saving people over and over. 

The single working mother is another type of hero. Lydia has many stories of trying to arrange weekend visits with the kids’ dad —it’s part of the custody agreement— but she drops them off at his mom’s place instead.

“They miss their dad even if they don’t say so,” she says. “Why did I marry such an ogre?” Another question that has no response, but love can be so bright that it’s difficult to see past the glare. 

My next-door neighbor Russell doesn’t imagine himself to be a gray-haired prince, but he shyly invites me for coffee. 

“I bought a box of vanilla wafers and I don’t eat them fast enough,” he says in way of explanation. How can I not be amused? His hands are large and wrinkled with clean fingernails. He checks once, twice, to make sure I have enough sugar and cream for my coffee, then asks about my students at the Adult Education Center.

“My wife was a teacher,” he offers. Russell wants the comfort of another body beside him on the couch and in bed at night, another pair of slippers shuffling around the kitchen. He imagines he’s older than me, but I appear static in age, gaunt with long gray hair pulled back in a smart bun. I smile with my mouth closed to hide my sharp teeth. Russell sparks with loneliness that would beautify any face. 

On Friday evening he asks if I would like to watch a movie. I sit with him on the couch, amused at his little glances and the way he rubs his hands together. His ghost wife sits on his other side and gives me a solemn smile. After the movie I let him kiss my cheek, say this has been lovely and I must be going. I don’t expect his tears, but he tries to brush them away.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “This happens when I’m tired.”

His ghost wife pats his shoulder. I pat his other shoulder and say it’s okay, the night hours are strange. I pad back to my cottage and tell myself I am not shaken. I’ve never lived beside people who carry so much sadness and worry in backpacks and tote bags, unable to rest their loads.

When I linger on Pat and Emma’s porch during a long evening chat, we hear the fights of reasonable people arguing over the last five dollars in the checkbook. We share glances and wonder how many more times the lot rent will be raised. I was accustomed to dealing with various demons and devils in the old country, but not of the financial variety. 

“It’s like they want to force us all out,” Pat mutters. “But our houses can’t fly.” Even if their homes were like mine and could sprout chicken legs, where could we walk them to under the glistening stars? My usual forms of remedy and revenge are not effective here. It would be a fine thing to see those corporate heads lined up on my fence posts so I could give them a talking-to, as in days past. Most of the skulls I collected were obstinate at first, but after a few years they came around. I assume my neighbors would be dismayed if I rebuilt my fence of bones, no matter whose skulls graced them. I cannot conjure against capitalism. 

When Lydia is too rattled to focus on her studies, we pause for coffee as she pours out another story about her ex. He didn’t take the kids for the weekend since he was going on a trip with friends. 

“He doesn’t care if he wrings their hearts out,” she says. “Then he’s late on child support, and I go to the food pantry and ask my mom for another loan. When we got married, he said ‘two incomes, two kids, we’ll be fine.’”

Lydia is a nursing home attendant, spends long hours helping people get in and out of bed and washing their delicate skin. She wants to be a registered nurse.

“All this school ahead of me feels like climbing Mount Everest,” she says. “I’m at the bottom wearing shorts and a t-shirt.”

She sips her coffee, opens the math book, sighs. 

I didn't expect my students and neighbors to give me stories willingly, different from my previous heroes who I didn’t really know at all. They completed a near-impossible task, so I’d grant them magical objects. I gave them the objects, and they tromped away from my cottage as the skulls chattered good-bye. I don't remember them as teary and needing hugs. I didn’t imagine my frail self could comfort someone in that way.

Emma and Pat host a neighborhood meeting in their living room and kitchen, cram the double-wide with chairs and pass around cookies to plot what we might do about future rent hikes. The solutions are varied: 

Buy lotto tickets. 

Have weekly bake sales. 

Declare the park a historic site since Woodrow Wilson's grand-niece by marriage used to live here. 

I ponder our adversaries, the board of faceless executives who raise the numbers on our monthly bills, and I remember the story of the demon and the young farmer. He had the (mis)fortune of meeting a devil in the forest, one who told him there was a bag of gold buried six feet under a certain tree. The farmer only had to dig a hole and retrieve it. He dug the hole, then crawled out and leaned way over to search for the gold. The demon gave him a shove, and the farmer fell in and broke his neck. If only I could save us by calling forth demons to help executives dig holes, but that feels as futile as a plate of peanut butter cookies. What magic could dissolve the system? 

When the serfs rebelled, sometimes there was change but always blood. Mostly theirs. 

Russell sits beside me, his hand over mine, and asks if I’d like another cookie. 

In the old days my heroes married their true loves. Lydia says it’s easier to go it alone and trade babysitting duties with friends.

“Mom is still mad about the divorce,” she says, “but we were so young when we got married, and he never shaped up. Now I feel like a bad parent. My kids eat too much macaroni and cheese and peanut butter.” 

“You're doing the best you can,” I say. 

“I'm never home,” she says. “They'll forget what I look like.”

Lydia isn’t fighting giants but filling in bubbles to the tick of a clock. I doubt my past and present heroes would switch places. The dragon you know is better than the dragon you don't. Quests take different forms, as do rewards and villains, but the struggle doesn’t end. In lieu of enchanted mirrors and combs, I offer more coffee. 

My hero, my Lydia, passes the GED after two months of bleary-eyed training. She appears at the Adult Education Center with a smile of triumph and fatigue, waving her white paper like a flag. Now she must organize her application materials for community college.  

“I made it over the foothills,” she says, slumping against me in a way that no hero ever did, but I’ve come to expect this casual embrace of exhaustion. 

“Coffee first,” I say, “and then forms.” 

Lydia grants me a tired nod and squeezes my hand. My old bones are still surprised by touch, but it is another result of having heroes who don’t fade into the forest. 

I’ve nearly exhausted my wisps of hope when Russell finds an ordinance related to the upkeep of historic structures. Such homes must have controlled rent policies if the tenants are responsible for maintaining the buildings in good repair. 

“I bet it was designed to keep those Victorian houses on Main Street looking good,” says Pat. “Shady Forest has a bunch of homes that are over fifty years old. You don’t find them everywhere, especially that queer little cottage of yours. I don’t recall how you moved it to the lot. Is it over fifty years old?”

“A few years past,” I say.

We copy the documents and crowd Pat and Emma’s kitchen when Emma’s granddaughter visits —a sweet young woman who just received her law degree— and whose eyes spark at the chance to have her own court battle while working as a paralegal. We can’t pay more than pocket change and cookies, but she grins.

“My law school friends will have ideas,” she says. “We may not win, but we can tie things up for a while. Nothing like a fly in the ointment.”

We only need another month, another month, another month of stable rent until those dismal corporate dragons decide we’re not worth the trouble. We never truly vanquish the villains, they just appear in different forms, a shifting battle of serfs versus lords in different times and places, heroes wielding swords and sticks and statutes as we dig our toes deeper into the dirt.