Poor enough.

When I was little, I was dimly aware that we were poor because we didn’t have any money.

Other people had things that we didn’t.

I didn’t even know what they had because we didn’t have a television. If we had a television, we could watch it and know what we were missing and how other people lived and what they had in their house so I could check to be sure we didn’t.

I almost always got almost enough to eat, but I was always hungry.

We scraped by, and I could hear us scraping.

I would walk down the street, hoping to find trees with fruit hanging over the fence above the sidewalk. If they were above the sidewalk, I could pick them legal, and I brought home dinner.

I didn’t know all the tricks, because we didn’t have a television. But I could still go next door with an empty cup to borrow a cup of sugar and pretend my Mother was making cookies (I wish!). The neighbors knew us well enough to not expect it back and didn’t come knocking on our door to say, “Are you finished with that cup of sugar?” or “Are there any cookies left?”
That never happened and the neighbors were mostly nice and even sometimes invited my family over. They fed us so I know something about food.

I wanted to go back and I’d say, “Can we go back over and maybe they’ll feed us some more, can we Mommy, please, please?”

Mommy would say, “They have to invite us first.”

I’d say, “I can knock on their door.”

I went in the back yard and tried to pull a branch of their lemon tree so it would hang over the fence and I could pick a lemon. And I took it inside and boiled some water. I found a tea bag and put it in the water and boiled it real good. Then I let it cool down. Then I squeezed up the lemon to within an inch of its life. Then I put in some sugar left over from the cup I borrowed. Then I let it cool down some more so I could drink my lemonade. If we didn’t have sugar, I just had lemonade without sugar. If we didn’t have a lemon, I just had tea water. I let the tea bag sit in the water for hours to get it as strong as possible. It got a little darker than just water and was a little stronger. I would drink it and live the good life.