Poor.

When I was little we lived in a single-wide brown mobile home on my grandparent's land, perpendicular to my Aunt Jeannie and Uncle Darrell's trailor. Our trailor was small and had lots of leaks and creepy things would often appear. We had slugs in the bathtub. Once we had a possum crawl up into the cabinet of my parent's bathroom, which I found when I was brushing my teeth. I remember screaming and running down the hall. Later my dad shot the possum.

We were poor.

Mom says if it hadn't have been for my grandparents, buying us food and the basics for survival, they would have never made it.

I tell this story for a few reasons. My mind has been racing lately with all kinds of things. Today my husband and I had a talk about our finances. Money is tight right now, as it is for a lot of people. Andy will graduate in just 5 short months and we are banking on a job at Acxiom that looks very promising, but they aren't hiring until May. Until then, we are attempting to get by without getting into any more debt. Today we discussed how to pay down our credit cards and have money saved up in our account when May arrives so we can start building our dream home.

Andy is stressed a lot about finances. I think he struggles with the fact that he is in school right now and can't provide what he wants to. Today, he went out for a few minutes and I stayed home. While he was gone I found myself worrying about money. I started looking at things we could put in a garage sale to make some extra money. And my thoughts led me to my childhood.

Again, we were poor. However, that trailor that we lived in was a castle to me. I remember on cold mornings my sister and I would wake up and run into the living room. We both slept in my dad's oversized tee shirts and we were always freezing when we woke up. When we reached the living room, we would lay down on the vent on the floor with a blanket, letting the heat warm our feet while dad brought us oatmeal.

I remember walking through the trailor after bathtime with wet hair in the summer. We always had the windows open with a fan blowing in to keep the cost down. I remember the distinct smell of honeysuckles that grew on the fence across the street and hearing my dad and cousin and his friends playing basketball outside on our make-shift court.

I remember mom being really worried about money at one point. I took her my piggy bank full of pennies and small change and told her she could have it.

Our other cousins lived in a big house in North Little Rock, which is still a well-to-do neighborhood to this day. I always loved going to their house; they had so much room for hiding and playing games. They even had a Go Cart that you could ride all around their huge backyard on the walkway that was meant for strolling. We would order pizza and pretend to make booby traps from the top of the stairs like in Home Alone. We would get out Michael's whip and hat and pretend we were Indiana Jones and had to scale up the stairway. Everything about their house was different than how I lived my life.

Interestingly enough, they loved coming to our trailor.

A few years ago when I still lived at home, I was driving home with my dad and I told him that I have such happy memories of my childhood and sometimes even wish I could go back. I remember seeing my dad get slightly emotional - which hardly ever happens. He told me that was wonderful to hear, and that we were so poor but that mom and dad tried so hard to just make sure we had a good childhood.

I guess my reason for these memories is to remind myself of what Andy and I have. We have a brand new house that has never been lived in. We drive nice cars and have nice things. We really don't have a lot of debt in comparison to many other people (besides the obvious - mortgage and school loans). And still, we continue to worry and plan and try to think of ways to pay the cards down or find ways to make more money. I continue to pick out our house plan and wall colors for the house we hope to build this summer, planning the kids rooms and making sure the living room will be big enough and the dining room large enough to hold our huge family. Page after page I find something I don't like about most of the plans. I have trouble keeping the square footage to the amount Andy has told me, which is huge anyway.

But at the end of the day it's not about any of that at all. I can only hope that when this new house is built and we do have kids, that they will have just as happy of a childhood as I had in that rickety old trailor.

Matthew 19:24
"And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."