Crenshaw

18

I guess becoming homeless doesn’t happen all at once.

My mom told me once that money problems sort of sneak up on you. She said it’s like catching a cold. At first you just have a tickle in your throat, and then you have a headache, and then maybe you’re coughing a little. The next thing you know, you have a pile of Kleenexes around your bed and you’re hacking your lungs up.

Maybe we didn’t become homeless overnight. But that’s what it felt like. I was finishing first grade. My dad had been sick. My mom had lost her teaching job. And all of sudden—bam—we weren’t living in a nice house with a swing set in the backyard anymore.

At least that’s how I remember it. But like I said before, memory is weird. It seems like I should have thought to myself, Whoa, I’m going to miss my house and my neighborhood and my friends and my life.

But all I remember thinking was how much fun living in our minivan was going to be.