by Lisa Twombly

Created on: September 13, 2007

I was a pretty observant kid, but I never knew we were poor. Perhaps it was because I grew up in a town where most families had even less than us. If you have the sniffles and stand next to a man in his last stages of lung cancer, which of you is sick? There was one child in my class who didn't come to school for a week because he had no shoes. This was 1977.

Our home was a 1940's four-room mill quarters, turned hunting camp, turned house. The plumbing was rudimentary at best, with water coming in through the faucets and dumping into plastic barrels that we took out once a week. We had a wood stove in the kitchen that burned extremely hot but only if you were within 12 inches of it. I don't remember owning a snow suit without the plastic melted off of the bum. I slept on top of my clothes during the winter. The upstairs space was closed off to contain the heat to the downstairs, but I crawled beneath the plastic stapled to the door frame as I was to sleep up there. At Christmas I was allowed to drag my mattress down into the living room to sleep where there was heat. This didn't seem strange to me then.

There were rules in our house. Supper was always served at 5:00. You had to take a bath on Sundays and you could never wear the same clothes two days in a row.
We had only one vehicle. It was a 50's wooden body pick up truck, "The Old Blue Goose", my step-dad took it to work at the paper mill and my mother sat at home smoking Salem 100's and drinking Pepsi, playing cards with the woman next door. I sat beneath the kitchen table playing Barbies and listening to sordid town gossip and Kenny Rogers singing on country radio.

When I was 14, my mother left my step-father. We moved into subsidized housing with hot water, heat and functional plumbing, that was when it finally hit me. I had known hunger, known cold, I had known the kind of anger and resentment that got thrown around the kitchen like beer bottles. I just had never known we were poor.

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