A poor thing, but mine own...mine, all mine... 

My father lived through The Great Depression.  And had been raisd by poor folk (nearly everyone was, back then).  I never had any $ to spare during my working life.  So I had a horror of owing money.  Almost as if the threat of some kind of psychic debtors' prison kept me in line.

When charge cards first came out, in the form of, hah!, "Chargex", one came in the mail...and, being broke, I used it.  I remember one broke night taking the kids to a restaurant for a decent meal (food stores didn't accept the new-fangled credit card thing).  And I remember the humiliation of being called into some kind of interview a few weeks later and being berated for, of course, not being able to pay the thing, and having it summarily withdrawn.

But normally there was no credit available to me - so I had to finance my life as I went along.  This meant a lot of scrounging, getting my and the kids' clothes at rummage sales and thrift stores - furniture, ditto.  My first-born had as her bed a pile of clothes on the floor (my horrified in-laws bought us a proper crib).

But I always had a house.  My father had paid off his house and I inherited it.  I sold it, moved East and bought another one for cash.  Both houses were sort of lower-middle-class affairs - but even so, very cheap for the time.  It was an era of burgeoning life-style...which I couldn't aspire to (supporting my family on a secretarial salary) and was content not to.  It was an employer who talked me into buying a car, my first, when I was in my mid-thirties.

After the kids were grown and left, I walked out on my alcoholic  musician husband and sold the house - and bought my current one. 

The real estate agent referred to it as "this piece of junk" and tried to lure me into more expensive places, where my cash would be a mere down-payment.  Mostly I had been looking at places that had no real-estate listings - I looked in the classified under "cottages" and "country". 

I settled on this place.  It was cute (under the awful asphalt siding), the roof line didn't sag and, the field-stone basement walls seemed to be (mostly) in reasonable shape, the place seemed solid enough (a log house that had survived over a century and looked good for another one).

I am constantly grateful to my father.  That was all he had to leave me, but it has sustained me all my life - I always had a house, which (repairs and stuff aside) I owned free & clear, plus an attitude of thriftiness.

With this place, I take pride in having insulated, done some interior re-arranging, built porches all around, all by myself, using a lot of salvaged materials from our local dump, and turned the surroundings into extensive gardens.  None of it is slick (doesn't happen so much any more, but more than one visitor has said, "How can you live like this?"), and on the middle-class scale my lifestyle descended towards survival.   

I am currently quite 'comfortable', thanks to marrying a good man some years ago.  He was unable (didn't try!) to get me out of my $17,000 self-renovated piece o' junk, except for a few days a week, when we stayed in his condo in the city.  (Then he'd come out here for a few days, and then we'd have a few days "off" - a civilized arrangement for two rather solitary middle-aged people who found alternating better than full-time compromise or capitulation...)  The thought has occasionally crossed my mind that I could now afford, on what he left me on his death a few years ago, a much *better* house, and even a *new* car.  But I love my house, a car is mere transportation (I am haunted by the saying that a new car loses a whole lot of its worth the minute you drive it off the lot), and I pay the current equivalent of Chargex as soon as I get the statement (well, usually).  Except for shopping and a few meals, my recent trips were paid for before I ever got on the plane.

My one daughter, who is on disability, lives next door in a mobile home we bought outright and then fixed up.  My late husband said, shortly before he died, that (since he knew I'd go back to living full-time in the country)  I should use the proceeds from the sale of his condo to pay off my other daughter's mortgage.  I've just sent off an installment to her towards that end.

I know that I owe my financial stability to my father and my late husband, thrifty poverty-fearing men both, and I have not entirely squandered their legacies.

I owe THEM ... but I don't owe anything to banks, credit companies, stores...