When You're Poor and Don't Know You're Poor: Life's Gifts Are Everywhere

                                     

                     
When You're Poor and Don't Know You're Poor: Life's Gifts Are Everywhere 

You are savoring the smell of fresh, crisp morning air and feeling the spray of morning mist across your face. Holidays take on a richness few can appreciate when you never want for anything and you don't know you're poor. 

An old blue coffee can full of rye grass kids pulled and made into Easter baskets awaits the Easter Bunny, jellybeans, spongy marshmallow pink, yellow, and blue colored bunnies, and maybe a chocolate candy bar. 

The thrill of apples, oranges, grapes, bananas, and coconuts under a Christmas Cedar tree the family searched for hours in the woods to cut. The anticipation of a long, thick, red, and white hard peppermint stick, a gift chosen just for you. 

Three Rhode Island Red hens were caught near the chicken coop, bound for Thanksgiving Dinner, laughter, sharing, and women preparing and cooking together. Meanwhile, the male folk gathered in a circle, sitting on homemade wooden planks resting on stumps, discussing politics and the ruination of humanity or speaking in turn of the reverence held by the group for kin folk, the President, and the Pope. 

Birthdays, a chocolate cake made with love and care from scratch, topped with tiny mixed-colored candles reused for years. Your wish may not come true, but you close your eyes and wish anyway. Summers rolling lemons to soften to squeeze to make lemonade, eating watermelons under the shade trees on ninety-eight-degree days and running to the creek to catch giant mud turtles, gigging big frogs from the pond for supper, or jumping in to cool off later, digging potatoes from the garden to prepare for a meal, and pulling fresh onions from the garden bed near the house. 

When you don't know you're poor, you have an abundance of everything. 

Autumn picking fallen apples, pecans, walnuts, hazelnuts, and persimmons, checking to see if the persimmon seed is in the shape of a spoon, a fork, or a shovel -- looking for signs that predict the winter snowfall or harshness. Grace before each meal, thankful for a life full of bounty and happiness. Granny passes a church and makes the sign of the cross. We kids pledged Allegiance to the United States of America each morning before classes began. The flag was a symbol of pride, reference, and patriotism. 

Knowing and following the Ten Commandments because they gave us the foundation to live a good life, love thy neighbor as thyself, and do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. 

In winter hog killing, family and friends gathered to slaughter seven hogs, splitting the meat among family members, women rolling out the dough for homemade biscuits while a few men ground pork into fresh sausage, adding lots of sage, salt, and black pepper and enjoying the first taste of fresh fried sausage and made-from-scratch biscuits. Listening to peacocks flying atop the meat house, their calls echoing through the barnyard. 

All tangible gifts are treasured long after the giver gave them. 

Spring's bounty watching the apple, cherry, plum, and dogwood trees burst into full bloom. Seeing wonder through the eyes of triplet fawns, the momma Doe steps softly through the woods, teaching, observing, loving, and spreading pride near a bright orange-lavender-rose-colored sunset. 

Summer evenings, trout fishing lines strung from a riverbank with empty gallon milk jugs dangling hooks, hauling in two #3 washing tubs of fresh-caught fish. Family and relatives gather for a fish fry, and women bring coleslaw and deviled eggs, fried potatoes, hushpuppies, and banana pudding. 

Only those with everything you do not possess materially think they know you are poor. 

You, your family, friends and neighbors, your church, and your school know you are the wealthiest people on earth. When you don't know you're poor, looking into the eyes of three baby chipmunks asleep midway down in the hollowed-out stump of an old Oak tree is all the joy in the world. It’s tangible, and it’s real. It represents life happening all around you. Life is good. 

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