They have their land. Because of the vast good fortune that Morgan and Kevin had bought their land outright, there is no mortgage on Old House, or New House, or Kate's. Because of Sam Carson's wealth, there is no mortgage on the Carson-McKenna's land across the Soque, either.
But, the taxes still have to be paid every year, and the sliding economy means that crop prices are bottoming out. The heads of all the households are always worried. Worry has become a way of life.
We think we worry. Most of us do and some of us have real reasons, but in researching the '30's, I began to see that most of us really don't know what the word means. They had no food stamps, no social security, no social services like Medicaid or public housing. The big cities had soup kitchens, with lines that stretched for blocks...and they served SOUP. Period. Well, maybe bread. No warm up centers, no place to sleep and breakfast and leave in the morning. Once a day soup, eat where you stood, and move on.
When the second world war finally came along, and baseball teams were decimated by the men joining the armed services, they called open tryouts. Out of work men flocked to them, but many fainted on the baseball fields the first day of tryouts. A decade of malnutrition had taken its toll. A DECADE.
I'm told that here in the hills, and probably elsewhere, a common meal was biscuits and "Hoover gravy". It was a thin, floury gravy with a taste of meat. A local man told me that his daddy never would have biscuits and gravy..."Don't give me no more of that Hoover gravy!" He was sick of it.
The Dust Bowl was booming in the midwest after years of drought. The topsoil blew away in clouds so vast and thick that people caught in the dust storms became lost, went blind from the scouring grains of dirt, and died from choking to death. The farmers couldn't farm in it; they lost their family farms and moved away.
But there was nowhere to go; no work; no homeless shelters. Towns put up signs not allowing them past the city limits. Those who had family, put the wives and kids with them and the men hopped trains to try to find work in other states. Hobos were everywhere. But there was no work.
The McKennas had it lucky. No, they didn't. They were blessed. My own family was blessed back then. Somehow, my grandfather in Atlanta held onto his job. We held onto our family land up here in the North Georgia hills. My people on my father's side in Ohio held onto their farm, even though my father was living on his own in Cleveland with his little brother and practically starving to death, living on rice and tea. But they were blessed.
We have worries, it's true. I worry about my kids and ISIS and if the woodpile if getting low. Some things are worth worrying about. But, like the McKennas, I am blessed. Our land where our house sits was in my family since the 1840's. My husband and son built this house by themselves and, although our furniture is shabby and the place is not finished, there's no mortgage on it and there will be no loan taken out to pretty it up.
We have chickens in the yard. We have a vegetable garden. We have a car that runs and my neighbor just gave me a bag of the prettiest church clothes to wear. And we still have a church to go to, up the road, to pray.
With Jordan McKenna, I can say: "We got it all right, I guess." More than all right.