by Heather Bowles

Created on: November 30, 2007

When I was a young girl, (4-5 years old) my parents hit a financial brick wall of sorts. This was during the "glorious days" of Ronald Reagan's Presidency. My parents were both working for the same company, a company that had massive lay-offs, with little notice. Both of my parents lost their jobs at the same time. We were living in an area that was considered a suburb of D.C., and was highly populated. With the recession in full swing, there were no jobs to be found. We ended up losing our apartment, and had nowhere, and I mean nowhere to go. A good friend of my father's who worked with him, and had also lost his job, said that he knew of a place where we could go. He had owned some land down in Southern VA, and we could all live there like one big happy family. So, my parents, with nothing better on their plates, decided to pack up what we could, gather the money for gas, and head down there. Things would surely be better there.

When we get down there, it turned out that this area was quite remote. The properties were separated by great amounts of land, which was a welcome change from the city. It seemed as if we had entered "paradise". It was just a beautiful area all around. We pull into what my dad's friend called "the driveway", and anticipated what our new home was going to look like. We all look, and look, but see nothing. Dad's friend was the only one not looking, and it caught all of our attention. I looked up at him, and asked him where the new house was, and that was when he hit us with it. There was no house. He did in fact own the land, but he had never built on it. He had just taken us hundreds of miles away from our home, with the promise that we could start over, just to find out there was nowhere to start.
Here we were, in the middle of nowhere, with nowhere to go, and no way to get there even if we did. So, we had to "saddle up" and make the best of it. For the next several weeks, we all lived as a family in a tent. Things were crowded, but we made it work the best we could. We showered at a local camp ground, I made a couple of friends at the grounds, and my parents had managed to get me into the school in the area. My parents were unfortunately unable to find work down there either, and things were getting rough. We were to a point where we were fishing every day just to stay alive. There was no other food. I began to lose weight, and the neighbors, about a mile away, began to get curious about the people who lived so close, yet so far away.
One

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>