Your experience sounds much like mine, Rapaire, although not because my Father was killed. In the late 30's as the country was climbing out from under the Depression, we almost lost our home. My parents only paid $2,000 for it when they bought it, but they were having trouble keeping up with the mortgage payments, so we rented out half of our house for $8 a month. Our house only had two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and very small bathroom, a dining room and a living room, and I had two older sisters. That meant that at times we lived in the living room and one bedroom, and shared the bathroom and the kitchen, and depending on who we were renting to at other times we lived in the dining room and one very small bedroom. The small bedroom was up on stilts and was not insulated. In the winter the blankets would freeze to the wall when it was particularly cold, in part be cause the roof leaked. When we lived in the half a house that didn't include the stairway to the basement, the only access to the washing machine was through a trap door in the one small closet, to climb down a ladder. I was little enough (pre-school for most ofr those years) that I didn't think of us as "poor," or feel the hardship in the way that my Mother must have.

Much of our food was from wild game or fish that my father caught on the weekends, and from our garden. But then, almost everyone was in the same boat, so we didn't think of ourselves as poor.

I guess I could say that I've been poor, but never really hungry. There were stretches of time as an adult where I just about lived on peanut butter, but it does stick to your ribs, as well as the roof of your mouth. I kid around that I ate so much peanut butter when I was going to college that people called me Skippy. That's a comment that's lost on on friends across the pond, as they don't have Skippy peanut butter..

Jerry