• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 405 0

the equation, the family still qualified for government cheese. For years Mom refused the cheese, in part because she felt that she and my father—with their education and opportunities—had made what we now call “a lifestyle choice” and shouldn’t expect any help towing the barge. But when my sister Rya—dying of congenital heart and lung failure, her potassium levels depleted by diuretics—got to where she would drink only orange juice, Mom followed the urging of a county social worker and signed up for the program so she could buy OJ concentrate by the case. She did the same thing when my little brother Eric, on gastric tube feedings from infancy until the time of his death at ten, needed special formula. And sometimes the social workers just insisted that we take the cheese. I remember it in the fridge, pale yellow inside the cardboard box, more like a giant pencil eraser than cheese.

We grew up poor but not wanting. Our clothes were nearly all secondhand and came packed in cardboard boxes, but I remember the arrival of the boxes as an occasion for excitement rather than shame. We clustered around as Mom sorted the booty, hoping somewhere in there was a cool T-shirt our size. When we pulled the shirts over our heads, they were already broken in, but the scent of unfamiliar detergent made them seem new. Once a year at the end of summer we went to Chippewa Falls to buy school shoes from a store owned by a man named Ed, who kept seconds and overstocks in the back for families just like ours. When we got home with our shoes, we’d bail out of the car and rip around the yard, convinced that this year’s tennies were the speediest ever. “These have good treads,” I’d say, cutting sharply like a running back.

Mom pinched pennies wherever possible, perhaps nowhere more than in the area of food. But we never went to bed hungry. Back before the big-box buying clubs of the present, there was a dingy warehouse in Eau Claire with great racks of off-brand and damaged goods. Rarely did we open a can of beans that didn’t look like it had been backed over by the truck that delivered it. And the Great Generic Craze that struck in the mid-1970s was right up Mom’s alley. The pantry was stacked with white cans labeled BEANS and white bags marked MACARONI. I am not a picky fellow, but I am not opening a white can that says TUNA. In later years, after I left the farm, my brothers provided harrowing details of meals comprised entirely of frozen leftovers from the county jail, but I am not going to pursue this story, as I’m not sure who Mom knew on the inside, and I’d hate to land her smack in the middle of a scandal at this late stage.

The savings began with breakfast. Five days a week we got oatmeal. Plain, gray, factory-grade oatmeal possibly useful as masonry mortar. In fairness to Mom, there were occasional deviations into decadence—farina with raisins! cornmeal with molasses!—and on Fridays she would indulge her profligate inner hedonist by stirring fourteen generic chocolate chips into a pot of oatmeal the size of your head. (In fairness to Mom, she has recently produced a breakfast schedule written on a recipe card that seems to indicate there was less oatmeal than I remember, but for all I know she made that card up a week ago, and I’m sticking with my story the way that oatmeal stuck to my ribs.) During a particularly impecunious stretch we cut back on oatmeal and ate boiled wheat, because the neighboring farmer let Mom scoop it straight from the grain wagon into a garbage can, thus qualifying her for the wholesale rate. Some of it we ground into flour. On Saturday we got pancakes, but I was legal to vote before I realized you do not make maple syrup by dissolving two tablespoons of brown sugar in a pan of hot water. Bottom line: if you had breakfast at our house on a weekday, odds are it originated from a twenty-five-pound bag or a thirty-two-gallon plastic trash can.

But Sunday…on Sunday we ate cereal from a box. Boughten cereal, we called it. Cereal like all the other kids ate. All the other kids, that is, whose mothers bought discounted