Coyote, I save my tears for beauty and you just made me cry. Thank Medium's newsletter for bringing you and your work to my attention.
Most Americans don't know that there are mountains in California, but I grew up in those mountains and lived there most of my life. Five years ago, I moved to Kentucky and it feels just like home to me - same culture and same way of thinking and doing. Back home, we played mountain music and this is where it came from.
My mother was a single parent and lived paycheck to paycheck. By Tuesday or Wednesday , every week, we were down to peanut butter and bread you had to cut the mold off. That's when Mama made SOS on toast for dinner.
SOS stands for 'shit on a shingle' but it's very thinly sliced beef, heavily salted, and put up in a jar ( and cheap). If you didn't know how to get rid of the salt, it was awful stuff. But Mama made chipped beef so well, we begged for it.
A jar of chipped beef was too expensive, so Mama bought the cheap stuff (sometimes 10 for a dollar cheap) in these frozen bags you had to boil and pour over toast.
Eventually a flood did us in, and we were homeless. A few months later, my uncle took me in. It was 18 months before Mama was back on her feet and came to get me. As I said, homelessness never leaves your brain.
Perhaps the best part of homelessness was learning how much I could do with my hands. I was amazed at all the things my hands could make with all the bits and pieces of things people threw in the trash. I made furniture, clothes, coats, doll houses, lamps, quilts, etc. from free stuff. I am still a world class dumpster diver.
In college I found my niche in industrial design. Professionally, I specialized in the rural environment and sold creative land-use solutions for a living. My work took me all over the country and several foreign countries as well, but I always came home to the mountains.
Right now, it is 7:15 a.m., and 5-degrees outside. The waters of the Rolling Fork are down, but it snowed again last night. Alas, its hard to keep water flowing in a trailer and my pipes froze, again. So far this winter, I've wracked up 25 days without running water.
No worries, I hike up the mountain to my daughter and her husband's home to shower. But I am getting older, so my daughter hauls buckets and pitchers of water from the outdoor spigot into the trailer so I can do my dishes and flush the toilet.
There was so much rain last week, it washed out our road. Luckily, Tuesday weather gave us a break, and we got the road repaired. It snowed on Wednesday, and we could not make it up the mountain in the car or truck.
As my son-in-law still repeats from the time of Covid, "it's time for a beer with Andy". We find Andy on the internet, and do what he says - we use his guidance to prepare, we take care of each other, we stay safe and we send what we can to whatever place Andy tells us will help Kentuckians in need. Andy Beshear is the only reason, I ever go on twitter.
For the record, we are not poor anymore. Nonetheless, we grew up poor. Not only do the habits of the poor stick to you, homelessness never leaves your mind.
For example, we build our homes with our own two hands, from the ground up. I'm living in a trailer on my kids' farm, right next to the 450 square foot home we are building for me (my retirement home). If we were not doing the work ourselves, a fully customized home for an aging woman would be well beyond our means. We are building our land the same way - farm, orchards, timber, cattle, barns, etc. Its an all hands on deck kind of life and I would not trade it for all the world.
