After A Major Storm Damaged My Home, My Daughter Said, “Just Stay In Your Car A Little Longer – I’m Busy.” So I Did. Now, Months Later, I Live In My Own Beautiful Home. When She And Her Husband Showed Up With Moving Boxes, Saying, “It’s Perfect For Our Nursery,”

The cardboard beneath my back had grown soft from three months of body heat and the occasional leak from the Honda Civic’s sunroof. I pressed my palm against the car window, watching the condensation from my breath fog the glass in small, perfect circles. Outside, the streetlight cast long shadows across the empty parking lot behind the defunct grocery store where I’d been sleeping since October.

My daughter Jane’s voice still echoed in my head from our last phone call. “Just sleep in your car a little longer, Mom. I’m busy with the baby coming and all.

You understand, right?”
I understood more than she knew. The flood had taken everything. My little house on Maple Street, my photographs, my mother’s china, forty years of carefully collected memories.

Insurance covered the structure, but not the life inside it. At 62, I found myself with nothing but a twelve-year-old Honda Civic and the clothes I’d managed to salvage from the muddy wreckage. Jane had seemed sympathetic at first.

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