I have to laugh to myself when I hear people who grew up with running water, electricity, cars, shoes, and full bellies whining and moaning about how miserable their childhoods were. My parents were children during the Great Depression. My mother's family were sharecroppers in Banks County, Georgia, who made their own underwear out of flour sacks, used an outhouse and pages from the Sears catalog for toilet paper, and picked cotton all day every day during cotton season for 50 cents a day. If they needed a bath they had to carry water from the creek to the house, heat it on a wood stove, and pour it into a portable tin bathtub. They used kerosene lanterns for light at night, and when it snowed in the winter they knew it before they ever got up because the snow fell in through the cracks in the ceiling and left snow stripes on the homemade quilts they slept under. New shoes were bought once a year for the oldest child of each sex, and then saved for the next children in line; if a hole wore into the sole of the shoe, they would line it with a piece of cardboard so they weren't walking on the ground. My father's mother died in childbirth, at home, when he was 2 years old, and his father was working for the Works Project Administration and was never at home, so my father was shuttled back and forth between his sister May and his brother Oscar so he would have a place to stay. When they went from Banks County to Baxley, Georgia, looking for work, they piled all their belongings into a two-horse wagon pulled by mules. Only the person whose turn it was to drive the mules got to ride in the wagon, and the rest of the family had to walk. It took them a little over two weeks to make the trip, and they slept on the ground under the wagon at night. It is unbelievable how much kids today take for granted.
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