I'm entering a new story about walking everywhere on Random Redhead. I just typed in this phrase, "As mom's pay scale rose, so did the distances we'd travel. Finally, we could afford to shop at K-Mart."

Then I busted out laughing. It's a pretty damn sad state of affairs when you treat K-Mart as a step up! Somehow, this is tremendously funny to me right now. Not rolling on the floor laughing funny, but that kind of painful funny where you laugh because it hurts. I really never looked at us as poor when I was a kid. We had limited resources, but so did everyone else. We weren't "poor" we were "struggling". We had shoes and coats and changes of clothing. We had a roof over our heads and enough food to grow on, if not enough to fill our bellies. We usually had gas and electricity, too. Although we did keep the heater at 65 degrees in the winter time, so that helped.

"afford to shop at K-Mart". (sigh) That's just sad.