Good old days?

          I did not know how poor we were until I started looking at some old pictures from the fifties a couple of years ago.

          My mother had six kids, my younger sisters and brothers wore tattered and stained clothes, sat in old high chairs that were so used the paint had worn off them. The only reason I did not have worn out clothes was because I was the oldest so there were no hand-me-downs for me.

          My mother's old and tiny kitchen cabinets had little paint left on them. She fed ten people every day using a tiny apartment sized stove.

          We lived in an old two bedroom house with the old dining room converted to a third bedroom as the family grew, six kids, mom, dad, grandpa and grandma.

          Mom had a small old Maytag washer with an add on wringer and we hung our laundry in the basement to dry. Mom spent her days taking care of kids, and her mother (who was an invalid after more strokes than anyone could keep track of). Mom was always standing at an ironing board, ironing clothes she took in from other families to earn a few extra dollars to support us. As I write this, I think any lesser woman would have fled into the night at first opportunity. 

          The old coal furnace needed to be stoked several times a day in the winter, coal ash had to be emptied into a bucket and then hauled out to the back of the yard each time we stoked the fire and the summers were hot and humid with no air conditioning.

           Everyone in the family today gives dad credit for holding the family together until he passed, but I am thinking it was mom's love that made the glue that held us together. It was mom's passing that triggered the separation. I have only seen one sister and no brother since the day we buried mom, in April of 2005. This piece started as a testimony to our poverty, but as things I write often do; it changed and is now a love note to mom for mother's day. I wish I had written it to her when she was still with us; she deserved it.