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I've had a thing about money ever since the summer before Grade 9, when my dysfunctional father told me — all conspiratorial-like — that I should work as hard as I possibly could because he and my mother hadn't saved a penny and they wouldn't be able to help me pay for university.

This was ironic (or perhaps entirely predictable) since he was never a star earner himself, despite his professional status. Years later (and well after their divorce) I told my mother about this and her jaw dropped. No, they hadn't saved for my education, but she was certainly planning to help me as much as she could.

Whether necessary or not, my father's attempt to gear my perfectionism toward capitalism was a great success. That summer a (kind of neurotic) worker bee was born.

As a teen I worked at six different jobs and saved every penny I earned. I got lucrative scholarships to university and, as an undergrad and grad student, continued to get scholarships along with well-paying teaching work. To this day I still love to earn and save. Oh, how I love to nurse along those numbers in my high-yield savings account. Oooooo. Money.

So now I'm 33 and I have three children, some dogs, a house and a husband. I run a business in addition to my full-time salaried job. My hobby is making extra mortgage payments ("I could buy that sweater, or I could put $40 into the mortgage. Mortgage it is!").

I occasionally like to watch financial rehab shows, chuckling in pity at the sad saps who are falling into the abyss of consumer debt. That's right — put them on cash only! Cut up their credit cards! Budget them within an inch of their lives!

But it's tough to be quite so cocky during our current economic crisis. Every day seems to bring news of more job losses in the thousands. While my husband and I are in recession-proof education jobs with solid pension plans, I am still uneasy, nervously checking the balances on our accounts and feeling like no one is safe. I prudently steer our money into the house and RESPs and sit tight.

Enter The Painting. It started innocently enough. I saw an illustration of a dog in a magazine and Googled the artist. A few seconds later I was on her website, falling hard for a nearly two-metre painting called Side Door, in which a young woman in a red tuque, her back to us, is about to step through a basement door in an old stone house. The snow is melting. Her reflection is like a ghost in the dark window of the door. Why is she going in the basement instead of up the white stairs to the fancy Victorian porch? Is she hesitating and looking in the window, or at her reflection? It's a perfect painting — completely familiar and yet thought-provoking. And it cost $6,000.

I became obsessed with the painting and its price tag: $6,000 would buy all the flagstone we wanted for the back patio; $6,000 was, coincidentally, the quote we were given on drywalling our basement; $6,000 was a year's worth of RESP contributions for all three kids; three years worth of dog food. Six. Thousand. Dollars. Sixthousanddollars.

This was bad behaviour. To even consider spending that kind of money when so many around me are losing their jobs? And where would we put it? The kids would get peanut butter on it. And the dogs! A fine spray of dirt and chaos would anoint it daily in the shabby disaster area of my house.

But the obsession continued. I started corresponding with the artist — a truly lovely woman, which only fanned the flames. Ultimately there was never a question of whether the painting was worth $6,000, because in my heart I was ready to spend that much on it. The question was whether my desire to buy it was frivolous, because frivolousness is a big no-no for the worker bee.

Like everyone else, I've been inundated with media coverage of the job losses in our part of the world and elsewhere. My own favourite cause, the environment, has been all but forgotten (once again). No one seems to be talking about education or health care. Or the arts. Especially not the arts. Rocks and drywall are the exact kind of investment governments are pushing right now.

The moral of the story became clearer and clearer. I bought Side Door. I invested in an Ontario artist and her Ontario gallery. I told the worker bee to relax. And now I get to look at that woman, about to cross a threshold, her reflection only semi-formed, the season in mid-thaw, for the rest of my life. There is nothing frivolous about that.

Latham Hunter lives in Carlisle, Ont.