Growing Up in North Dakota

minute walk away from our house, past the school on the way to the town dump. Her family was very poor and I’m sure was on welfare. I think her dad was a “drunk.” Their house was a shack really with no electricity or running water. I remember her mom would do the laundry out in the yard, using a generator for an electric ringer washing machine that she had. In the summer the clothes would dry on clotheslines outside, in the winter on clotheslines indoors. The house had a dirt floor that was covered with linoleum and the walls were not painted plasterboard but rather just the wood that that house was made from.

There were clothes all over the place inside, as they were the recipients of gifts like this “for the poor.”
I remember I went to her birthday party – I remember what they served because it was so different. We had baked potatoes, with margarine on them – that was the first time I’d tasted margarine. We also had red jello – I remember wondering how her mom had made it since they had only an icebox for refrigeration. I gave her a bag of candy for her birthday. Anyway, I think I’d heard some time ago that Anita had become a prostitute. Pretty sad ...