the-dreamer-disease:
rose-de-noire:
moralistically:
parisianqueen:
During the most poor and homeless period of my life, I had a lot of people get angry with me because I spent $25 on Bath and Body Works candles during a sale. They couldn’t comprehend why the hell I would do that when I had been fighting for months to try and get us on our feet, afford food, and have an apartment to live in.
Those candles were placed beside wherever I slept that night. In the morning, I would move them and set them wherever I’d have to hang out. At one point I carried one around in my purse - one of those big honking 3-wick candles. I never lit them, but I’d open them and smell them a lot.
I credit that purchase with a lot of my drive that got me to where I am today. I had been working tirelessly, 15+ hour days with barely any reward, constantly on the phone or trying to deal with organizations and associations to “get help at”. It’d gone on for almost a year by the end of it, and I was so burnt out, to the point that I would shake 24/7. But I could get a bit of relief from my 3-wick “upper middle class lifestyle” candles. They represented my future goals, my home I wanted to decorate, and how I would one day not be in this mess anymore.
When we moved into the apartment, and our financial status improved, I burned those candles every single day. When they were empty, I cleaned them out, stuck labels on them, and they became the starting point of my really cute organization system I had ALWAYS planned to have.
So whenever I hear about someone very poor getting themselves a treat - maybe it’s Starbucks, maybe it’s a home deco item, maybe it’s a video game… I don’t judge them. I get it. I get that you can’t go without anything for that long without it making you go crazy. You need to pull some joy, inspiration, and motivation from somewhere.
poor people deserve things they want, too. it is unfair to expect poor people to only buy things they “need”.
also a comfort item IS A NEED!
When I was homeless, someone actually got in to a massive argument with me because I bought myself hair dye and a 24 ounce can of awful cheap beer.
I was feeling awful about myself and wanted to find some normalcy. So I wanted to dye my hair and drink a beer while I did it. This, to me, made me feel normal. I didn’t even have gloves so my hands were dyed for weeks. But it felt so damn good to do something that was normal to me. It gave me a boost that lasted for weeks because every time I saw my hair in my relflection it gave me a little more pep in my step.
Even now, I have my own place. I support family members. I barely have any extra money for ice cream after a hard day. But I still find time for little things like this because sometimes a little bit of your normalcy is what’s really needed to get you through those hard times.
I have some additions, if I may, that arise from the Worst economic time in our country’s history.
When the Depression hit, no one really thought about the reason much, why a sock should have an orange in it, come Christmas, This tradition, brought across to America by immigrants, had acquired its own sort of identity. It begins with the folktale of Old St Nicholas throwing gold down a chimney that landed in a sock and melted into an orb. But there were no gold orbs to be had. Oranges were the poor man’s orb, but they were not cheap, especially if you couldn’t afford food at all. The orange became the only thing many children ever saw at Christmas time. One single piece of fruit, to sustain them for a year.
One orange. The sweetest orange.
They would pop a few handfuls of corn and use a needle and thread to make garlands for their fireplaces. Strips cut from the Sears catalogue to make paper chains. The 5 and dime had inexpensive glue and thread and fabric, and from that and an old shirt now turned into a tea towel, a pair of button eyes would find a new doll. Chunks of mealy potato dried out and painted, strung like gemstones. Paper mache wall art made from newsprint. Haphazard quilts as thin and heavy as a sheet of lead but as bright and colorful as a circus, assembled from table cloths and worn out sheets and things culled from the rubbish. Rag rugs, knitted out of refuse, but joyful and soft underfoot.
The patterned cotton dress began when the flour companies noticed that people were using the sacks to make anything they needed, and decided that even though it might increase cost slightly, they would purchase patterned fabrics. Buying a sack of flour became a simultaneous way to give your child something new. Or finally put some curtains on that old, cracked window. The fabrics were all very simple, but cheerful, from pink gingham to cyan check, purple paisley and polka dots. Pretty things.
And now people pay hundreds for soft patterned cotton dresses not one tenth as velveteen on the skin.
Metal tubs suspended in trees, hung with burlap curtains, a valve installed at the base for primitive showers in rainwater heated by the sun. Cotton puffs turned to delicate little birds using an old envelop and tiny sticks.
Comfort and art from garbage.
I have a ring in my collection. It is a thick, shiny man’s ring. It was a wedding band. Silver? You’d think so, looking at its wide circumference and its solid square head. You’d say it was machine beveled because it is so precise, and that the man who wore it was of means.
It was a piece of steel pipe. He and his fiancé were poor. They were cleaners for a factory and they wore out their hands and knees to start a life together. They could not afford rings for their ceremony, but the man would have none of it. By damn, his beautiful bride in her flour sack dress was going to have a ring. And so he cut two tiny pieces of pipe from a junk heap and spent hours filing, chiseling, burnishing, polishing, with two files and some sand. He made a matched set. Hers went to the grave with her. His found its way to me.
They were married almost 60 years.
Extreme poverty is an oubliette. One falls into it and the longer one is immersed, the less one recalls the time before. One tiny expenditure becomes a shameful regret. Illness becomes a burden. Hope is eliminated through deterioration of the mind that is meant to remember and find the way back out. And worse yet, no stranger notices you are there but you, and if they do, they look away, because “there but by the grace of the almighty dollar, go I”.
Those jailers who ridicule you, see you when they bother to look in. They don’t live in that darkness with you.
These tiny luxuries you give yourself are not sins as dictated from on high by some divine economist who decided you must earn your freedom through oppressive sorrow. These luxuries are the handholds you need to climb out of that pit, to have stamina, to keep focus, to remember that there is another type of life. It can be had, and by you too.
In this economy, I fear things will only get worse for many, so even if you cannot afford a treasure, then make one. Craft that token that will keep you strong and grounded.
This is an important thing.
