Her family won a raffle.
Well. Sort of.
It happened a long time ago, but the event will never leave the woman’s memory. Not even when she is old and gray, lying in her final bed. There are some moments that stick with a body.
“Ain’t never gonna forget it,” she tells me in a thick Tennessean accent. “None of us will. No way we could.”
She grew up poor. Very poor. Imagine the poorest kid you knew growing up. Now multiply that times a few hundred. That was her.
Her brothers and sisters were bone thin, her parents were as shapely as fence posts. Sometimes the family went whole weekends without eating anything more than cold grits and hambones.
I’ll pause right here. Can you imagine being a child and not having enough nutrition to make it through the day? And yet, currently, there are 13 million American kids living in homes without enough food. Or, to put it like this: One out of every six children will face hunger this year.
“We were pretty much hungry
all the time,” she said. “We quit paying much attention to our sour stomachs.”
The ramshackle house sat on the edge of town, sort of leaning sideways. You’ve seen the kind of place I’m talking about. It was the house everyone drove past while shaking their heads in disgust. The word “eyesore” comes to mind.
There was a leak in the bedroom—if you could call it a bedroom. The room was just a couple of mattresses thrown on a pine floor.
There was no running water.
“We had to steal water from our neighbor’s hosepipe.”
The electricity was never on—no heat, no lights. And the kids were usually fighting some kind of seasonal infection from being malnourished.
But one holiday season, that all changed.
“This man came to our house,” she said. “He was driving a little green car, and wearing one…