My name is Sara. Many of you know me as Brutal Sun, the feline artist. And many of you also know my sister, Leslie, who is also an artist. The descent into homelessness can be so gradual, it’s difficult to grasp it’s actually happening until it’s too late. It begins with a few hard weeks. Then month after month of grinding poverty passes by. Then a year, and some more years. Yet we humans endure it. Why? Because we like to hold out hope that things will “just get better.” Being proactive about a situation is hard and uncomfortable. Instead of getting on a lifeboat, we mistakenly believe our ship is merely bobbing downwards between waves, when in reality, it’s bound for the Mariana Trench. Homelessness can happen to even the smartest, strongest, and most resourceful people on earth. In our case, it started when our landlord decided to scrap the single wide we’d lived in for seven years, and replace it with a half million dollar home. Lets be honest, though. Our descent into homelessness truly started sooner than that. Dreams of being artists stubbornly had to be followed. There were health issues. A bad Wyoming winter that had me shoveling snow hours every day. Things broke and needed fixing. My sister did get a really good job driving for FedEx this spring, but by that time, it was too late. Add a bunch of animals into the mix, and the hardships of losing a home multiplies. There just aren’t many rentals that take animals, especially if you have an array of them. My sister and I are owned by three senior cats. One nervous young kitty who doesn’t adapt well to change. Two old horses we’ve had for decades. A flock of mostly geriatric chickens. A rooster. Some ducks. And one really loud goose. Because of this, we were forced to leave Wyoming; we simply couldn’t find a new home there. We piled our animal overlords into my truck and horse trailer, rented a U-Haul for our furniture, and drove with two vehicles to a farm in northern Minnesota. It seemed like a sweet deal. Cheap rent in exchange for labor. A home in the woods. And the animals were allowed. We could work hard, save money, and build credit. Crawl out of poverty. Maybe even thrive. We had no idea we were on the highway to hell. Our new landlady was super nice over the phone, and for the first week we were there. But, it turned out, she was addicted to pain meds, and lots of them. She was emotionally dysregulated. Furthermore, she demanded so much labor from us, we couldn’t even make rent or food money. As the days rolled on, she started to downright scare us. When she wasn’t deep in a drug bender, she’d frequently come into our home when we weren’t there. Once we caught her filming us with her phone. Another time, she got hysterically upset after my sister moved a block of wood out of the way while feeding her chickens. Yep, a block of wood! Some days, she’d text us every few minutes, nitpicking about the smallest things. For example, one time I drove home from the store and parked my truck. She texted that I needed to move the truck to another spot. That I wasn’t in my “official” spot. So I did. After I unloaded the groceries, she texted me again that she had made a mistake, that I was supposed to park in another spot. These kind of interactions with her were never ending. We were at her beck and call. It was exhausting! On top of that, the mobile home we were staying in was in horrible condition. The place smelled. Mice were everywhere. It had collapsed ceilings. Rippled floors from water damage. No carpet or flooring whatsoever throughout most of the home, just plywood. It wasn’t worth all the work we were doing for her, much less the $600 a month rent she was asking for it on top of our servitude. We told her we were leaving. She screamed, “I FORBID YOU TO LEAVE.” We left anyway, but not without big trouble. First, we put our furniture in storage (because we couldn’t afford another U-Haul). Then we set to packing all our animal overlords into the truck and trailer. That’s where things got real bad. Two cats escaped into the woods. And the young cat, who was supposed to be in the now-empty mobile home, had vanished without a trace. Three cats missing! In the dark! On that woman’s property! Somehow we found and captured the two kitties in the woods. But the young kitty was still nowhere to be found. We had a bad feeling he’d slipped through a hole into the walls of the mobile home, or even gotten beneath the mobile home. My sister texted the landlady, and told her we were short a cat, and that we were going to calm down our nervous energy. See if he’d come out for his dinner. She rushed over to the mobile home, and demanded we leave immediately. My sister ignored her, and looked under some kitchen drawers. There, the kitty was barely visible, hiding under some floor boards. My sister wrangled him out from there and clutched onto him for dear life. We left that place exhausted. But we wanted to get as far away from it as we could. So we drove for hours, barely awake, until we found a quiet grocery store parking lot to sleep in. A nice old man watering grocery store plants let me fill a bucket of water for the horses. The next day, north of Minneapolis, my pickup truck broke down at a gas station. Woo hoo! Luckily I was able to fix it myself. But not without a trucker’s help, advice from my brother over the phone, several hikes to an O’Reilly’s, and laying on oily pavement for hours. Eventually, we got back on the road, and made it to southern Missouri. There, some good friends with a farm took us in. Our friends have been so kind to us. They have gone above and beyond taking care of us for the past few weeks. They’ve allowed us to use an air conditioned semi trailer to keep our cats in, and to make some art to sell. But we simply can’t stay here anymore They’ve got family coming over for an extended stay, and we need to get out ASAP. Our animals are tired. We’re tired. Our backs hurt from moving so much furniture. We haven’t slept well in weeks. We have no money, and little way of making much right now; we had to take on too many art commissions to get where we’re at now. Those commissions need to be completed before we can really make much new money off art. And as many of you know, it’s difficult to get a “normal job” without a home address. If we can’t get into a home, our last option is to camp. And that’s risky. Because of avian flu, my sister’s beloved birds could get confiscated. Few campgrounds allow horses, and those that do tend to cost money. Four cats living in a tent could be tricky at best. Moreover, my truck plates expire soon, and without an official address, that will cause a whole new slew of problems. We’re hoping to find an inexpensive home that will take all our critters. Probably a run down farmhouse or a mobile home on acreage. Preferably, it would be within 30 minutes of a FedEx hub, where they dispatch drivers, so my sister can quickly get a new job. Also, because we’ve had a financially brutal last few years, any places that demand credit checks are out. We monitor Craigslist, Marketplace, and Zillow everyday, across several states. Sometimes a viable prospect pops up, but they rarely last a day. Without having actual money in the hand to jump on something, there’s not much we can do. As a last resort, we’ve decided to try this LFEBridge. I don’t know if it’ll work. And I’m unsure how much to ask for. We don’t know if we’ll have to drive far to our new home. Or if our new home will cost $600 or $1200 a month. We also need to get our stuff out of storage up in MN, and that could cost a pretty penny, depending on how we go about it, and where our new home is. That said, if we have a home and jobs, we could technically live on some bare essentials for a month or so, and save up to get our stuff back … at least we have our coffee pot, vacuum, and art supplies! Anyhow, we’ve picked a starting amount we think would get us into a place, and also help us with any travel expenses, or unseen extra costs. We thank you for reading our wild tale! We will be updating this page as best as we can with our iffy internet access. Sincerely, The Homeless Homestead
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