flowers for sale.

cold hard cash in the age of student loans.

$0.00 is the amount I have left to pay on my student loans. Bizarrely enough, a ticker-tape parade was not thrown in my honor when my very last monthly payment came out of my bank account. Indeed, I'm fairly certain that the only direct acknowledgement of the accomplishment that I did receive was a dip to my credit score. (A scam if I ever knew one.) To see the balance for myself, I needed to open a new online account with the latest servicer in a line whose count I've lost track of. This loan is paid in full.

It's maybe gauche to write about, but it's not every day that the monthly debt I've paid for the last twenty-one years gets whittled down to zero, so here I am, throwing my own parade. My student loan story is one born of privilege. I'm a kid from a family whose parents couldn't afford to send me to the fancy colleges they were proud for me to attend, but there was a big old house and an equity line that could be leveraged to pay for the portion they did cover. There was a generous private scholarship and the mantle of generational wealth, no matter how piddling, that gave me the confidence to take out the loans in the first place, the assurance that I wouldn't be utterly crushed by the weight of what I was signing up for. There are two fancy degrees with my name on them.

Over the weekend, my kids sold flowers on the side of the road at my parents' house. They used the same rolling cart I used as a kid and gleefully pedaled flowers they didn't grow from a garden that's not theirs. They stuck stems into old glass jars—jam and honey and maple syrup—that my mom saves for the purpose. Customers stopped to hand them flurries of bills wet from the beach; more than was expected or really deserved. They sold a dozen bouquets and in an hour of waving beatifically at strangers and squabbling with each other over seating arrangements, they'd made enough money to buy their very own banana yellow kayak from eBay, sized for kids and poised for delivery next week.

Maybe I should have made them put the money into a college savings account. Faye tells me she wants to go to Harvard, and I'm not sure which hour of utterly unmonitored television she's watched this summer that I have to thank for the idea. For my part, I'm not sure how to feel about the debt that I accrued and slowly, often painfully, paid off for the privilege of going to college. I have no idea how I might afford for my own kids to follow in my footsteps. I can’t imagine looking them squarely in the eyes and encouraging them to take out the same kind of loans that have saddled me for the last two decades at the same time I can’t imagine telling them not to.

For now, I'm a 39-year-old mom who just finished paying for college and graduate school and decided to let her kids buy a kayak. Taking things one paddle at a time for the foreseeable future.