Since my Dad’s health began rapidly declining, my mother got us a collapsible ladder to climb, and, while we played in the same tiny room, right beside us, she started a home business without any money in order to support our family. To this day I have a scar on my forehead from that fall. One day in the midst of another fire alert my mother and I fell off steep run-down stairs. The neighborhood we lived was rather unwelcoming: one neighbor threatened to assault us if we did not attend his church, another tried shooting our dog, another was murdered, yet another purposefully used to burn trash next to our shack causing fires we were forced to extinguish. Once she even called the whole town of three thousand people and invited them to our home, but nobody came. My mother used to walk with us in our rural community in hopes of finding friends for us, but one door after another got shut in front of us. We often washed dishes in a utility sink in our basement that was perpetually flooded. The unfinished drywalls with deep cracks were our only decorations. Large ugly holes and paint spots were all over the cracked plywood. We had no kitchen, barely any furniture, except for one mattress, one chair, one small bookshelf, a few hand-made books, three pots and two iron cast pans on a portable burner. When I was born my father got suddenly very ill and nearly died, most probably from toxins in our well water and pesticides that were sprayed over our house by the crop planes. My mother delivered me just like my older two brothers at home, underwater, by herself, without a midwife’s or doctor’s assistance. In 1994 our family was living in a dilapidated shack on the edge of a corn field, not too far from a huge nuclear power plant.
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