The Nightstand
Roger Barbee
December 26, 2023
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Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
Poverty has many ways of marking a child.
Growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s in a Southern cotton-mill town, I was the fourth of six children of a single mother who did the best that she could; but her job as a hemmer of washcloths in Plant #1 paid little, and six children had many necessities that shut the door on nonessentials.
Growing up in the textile town, I was reminded of my poverty by what I could not have.