Revisiting My Childhood Home
Growing Up Dirt Poor In The South
I hadn’t seen it in many years. I guess the thought of it had sunk somewhere into my subconscious. But as I got out of the car and looked it over, memories came flooding back to me.
Memories of how poor we were, of how hard my parents worked to get us out of it, and how the very walls of it molded me into the person that I am today.
It was sweltering hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter.
I remember Mama carrying five-gallon buckets of water from the well through the tight hallway and dumping the water into the bathtub so that we might have a cold bath and find some relief from the Georgia heat. I remember her opening the windows and doors, praying for a breeze as I lay in a puddle of my own sweat on the cool linoleum floor.
In the winter, Mama would heat the tiny little trailer by taping plastic over all the windows, lighting the apartment-sized gas stove, and letting it run for a couple of hours before we went to bed.
I remember our tiny little fold-out table where the three of us gathered at night in anticipation of the one meal we would have that day. Usually black-eyed peas and cornbread because that’s all we could afford.
